Celebrated film director Wes Anderson has brought his stylised vision to Bar Luce, a bar and café integrated within Fondazione Prada’s startling new outpost in Milan’s Largo Isarco industrial district. Affectionately paying homage to the great Milanese café, the interior emulates these in the filmmaker’s inimitable brand of kitsch, with pastel tones and patterned wallpaper knowingly recreating the vaulted glass ceiling and dense tiers of the city’s symbolic Galleria Vittorio Emanuele. Another rich source of inspiration was the local popular culture of the 1950s and 60s, with a pink-flecked floor and veneered wood wall panels referencing the era while the sound of classic Italian crooners drifts dreamily from a vintage jukebox. ’I tried to make it a bar I would want to spend my own non-fictional afternoons in,’ Anderson explained. For devotees of the auteur, nods to his oeuvre should prove irresistible – amuse yourself on the customised Steve Zissou pinball machine, while appreciating the playful atmosphere and Formica tabletops borrowed piecemeal from his short film Castello Cavalcanti.
