For their first major commercial design collection, film director Luca Guadagnino and production designer and architect Stefano Baisi aren't interested in recreating the sets from their movies. Instead, they're interested in what happens when world-building becomes real.
Their debut collection for Zara Home, referred to by the brand as an 'atlas of desire', spans some 200 pieces including garments, scents, lighting, furniture and homeware. For the duo, who have spent almost a decade working together, it marks their first commercial foray into the world of furniture and fashion. 'We understand each other,' says Baisi of their creative dynamism, 'and we can speak the same language when we when we work together.'
The collaboration began in 2017, when Guadagnino hired Baisi to head up his eponymous interiors studio. As the studio's architect, Baisi worked across everything from homes and shops to hotels and fashion shows. In 2024, he took on his first role as a production designer, building a surreal version of 1950s Mexico City for Queer, Guadagnino’s adaptation of William Burroughs’ novel featuring Daniel Craig. After the Hunt, starring Julia Roberts, followed in 2025, for which Baisi conjured rarefied East Coast interiors for the film's academic characters.
'Cinema doesn't reflect on the physical objects,' Guadagnino explains. 'It reflects on the silhouette – on an image that can communicate something you need to know about the character.' Design, by contrast, the pair agree, is made for real people. 'I personally believe that a [film] set must reflect the lives and the story of the characters,' explains Baisi. 'So from my perspective and in my experience, nothing [in cinema] is done for the sake of beauty itself. That's the point, and I think that design is something different. It's done for people, to be desired and to last forever – and to enrich people's lives.'
While you won't find an exact armchair from I Am Love or a kitchen table from A Bigger Splash, cinema wasn't entirely absent as a source of inspiration. Rather than their own films, it was the colour and atmosphere of others that provided a visual compass – Guadagnino name-checks Cemetery of Sun by Nagisa Ōshima (The Sun's Burial), Yi Yi by Edward Yang and Prenom Carmen by Jean-Luc Godard.
The collection's accompanying text freely acknowledges its historical reference points, from Viennese Secessionism – clearly seen in the 'Uncollected' sofa – and French Art Deco to Brazilian Modernism and Italian Radical Design. Some of those references are more explicit than others: the oak-and-wool 'Purkersdorf' chair – which closely resembles a squatter version of Josef Hoffmann's 'Seven-Ball Chair', circa 1907-1908 – takes its name from the Austrian sanatorium designed by Hoffmann, whose work Baisi has previously cited as an inspiration for After the Hunt. The resemblance has not gone unnoticed, with some commentators online questioning where homage ends and imitation begins.
A series of stainless lighting designs have a playful Italian postmodernist appearance – all squiggly stems and legs with geometric diffusers and feet. Guadagnino highlights the 'little touches of surrealism' that appear throughout: the collapsed legs of the 'Amalita' desk and 'Cygni' coffee table, which seem to slump under their own weight, or the scalloped bases of the 'Fainting' armchair and 'Bretonita' sofa that peep out beneath the upholstery. 'We had a great pleasure in thinking of the collection in these terms with our friend [film producer] Carlo Antonelli.'
Are these the pieces they wanted to live with but could not find? 'I think we are not so selfish,' smiles Guadagnino. 'I think we really wanted to do something that we felt could speak the language we wanted to speak, which was a language of form and colour.'
Guadagnino, who previously made a short Christmas film for the brand in 2021, recounts how the seed of an idea for a collection with Zara was planted during a visit to the Marta Ortega Pérez Foundation (MOP Foundation) in Spain where Zara's vast headquarters in La Coruña is also located. Conversations with chair of Inditex Marta Ortega turned into concrete plans and by April 2025, the duo were working with the Zara Home team to bring the collection to life. Zara, they said, gifted them complete creative freedom.
For Baisi and Guadagnino, this meant extending the collection to include a wardrobe for men and women including roomy trenches and pea coats in tweed, fresco wool and leather, tailored suits and chunky knitwear. The prevalent earthy palette is enlivened by jewel-toned satin and sequins across shirts, skirts and dresses, while printed illustrations of fruits, flowers and fauna by Italian artist Francesco Snote appear on clothing and ceramic tableware. A series of scented candles adds another sensory layer – the Baisi Guadagnino world smellls practically edible, in case you were wondering, with blends of verbena, kumquat and galbanum, and blood orange, grapefruit and orange blossom. Together, these elements create a complete domestic universe – a Gesamtkunstwerk in the manner of Hoffmann himself.
'We knew we wanted to create a world, not just a collection comprised of few elements,' says Guadagnino. 'Apart from our pleasure of working together and creating together, this comes mostly from the way in which you have these very wide possibilities in Zara and in Zara Home.'
Indeed, collaborations with designers including Vincent van Duysen, Collagerie and Colin King have helped Zara Home bring a particular strand of contemporary design to a broader audience. It is worth noting, however, that accessibility is relative. While fashion starts at £19.99 for a pair of socks and rises to £289 for a leather jacket, the furniture is decidedly less high street: the 'Uncollected' sofa will set you back £11,660, while a table lamp costs £399.
To mark the launch, Baisi and Guadagnino have also created a 20-minute short film. Directed by Guadagnino and written by Scott Z. Burns – the screenwriter behind Contagion, The Bourne Ultimatum, and The Report – it stars Jamie Bell, Patricia Arquette, Michael Stuhlbarg and Chase Sui Wonders. 'It's like a feast,' enthuses Guadagnino of the short. 'When we started shooting and then wrapped four days later, it was a bit strange because for me it was like a movie – I was like, "why are we finished so early?". It was amazing.'
Baisi worked on the film's production design and has also designed staging for the collection's in-store presentation, which will be unveiled in Milan during Fashion Week as a two-day public pop-up at the city's La Pelota event space. For now Baisi is not giving much away, but promises it will be 'playful, fanciful and consistent'.
'I would like people being pleasantly surprised by the collection,' reflects Baisi, before Guadagnino adds, 'as a way to change their mind about themselves.' There is, they suggest, something intuitive and even revealing about the objects we choose to live with. 'There's no single way of choosing pieces, and it's not always consistent,' says Baisi. 'It's something that comes from instinct.'
For Baisi and Guadagnino, home is not a fixed point but wherever they hang their hats. These pieces, they hope, will become part of other people's stories. 'You can make love, and you can embrace, and you can be five people on a couch,' laughs Guadagnino. 'It could be a machine of love.'
Baisi Guadagnino for Zara Home will launch on 26th September at zarahome.com, zara.com, and at select stores worldwide. The collection will be presented on 26 and 27 September during Milan Fashion Week at La Pelota, Milan, through a two-day public pop-up set within a site-specific installation by Luca Guadagnino and Stefano Baisi. The pop-up will be open from 11am to 8pm