The Red Room PDF Print E-mail
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The name of the red room comes from the colour of the rococo pieces placed here at the end of the nineteenth century, when the house belonged to Mr. Kees and the room was used as a reception room. With its vault and strucutre, it shows the same "Seicento" look, that it had when the ancient convent was demolished to be replaced by a villa wanted by Mr. Lelio Mornico (1609-1645).
Also at Mornico's times the red room was used as a reception room and according to that period customs, it was furnished with portraits showing family members. This is reported in the inventories of the eighteenth century, which also mention more windows on the wall towards the lake (three pieces instead of the actual two).
 
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The ceiling equipped with an important nineteenth century wrought iron chandelier, still shows the same vault with perimetrical lunettes of the eighteenth century. The actual decoration dates back to the nineteenth century.
The walls tapestry is red like the room furniture. It reproduces whorled ornaments in relief, vegetable garlands and rococo style shells. It is of nineteenth century manufacture and copies the impressed leather tapestries used in luxury houses in the seventeenth century, not only as an ornament, but to keep the room warm too.
 A fireplace of the nineteenth century is placed in a corner between the wall facing the windows and the wall of the contiguous sitting-room. It is made in white marble and orned with two small putti sculpted in relief on the supports and a pattern with shell and flowers on the front side (inside it, behind two peach-flower marble panels, is hidden a cast iron radiator).
On the wall facing the windows hangs a large arras of the eighteenth century. Recently restored, it shows a lion-hunting scene. It was manufactured in the famous Anversa laboratoires, working in this field since the end of XIV century.