The World of Interiors

Victoria Press was born in the USA in 1927

and she emerged in New York in the late 1940s as a fashion de-

signer. After her marriage to South African tycoon Sydney Press

in 1953 (they eventually divorced) she went on to create several

memorable interiors in New York London South Africa again

London and finally Venice where she died this past April at the

age of 88. By then and in the course of doing all those houses she

had become a self-taught connoisseur of architecture furniture

and gardens mostly English. She developed an informed passion

for Oriental porcelain putting together a museum-quality col-

lection of blanc-de-Chine. Part of it is displayed on white book-

shelves she designed for the drawing room on the piano nobile of

Palazzo Giustinian Persico which overlooks the Grand Canal.

Victoria acquired the apartment in the mid-1980s and had

been restoring and perfecting it ever since. Until the very last

weeks of her life says photographer Tessa Traeger her long-time

friend and the author of these pictures Victoria was fretting over

some unfinished details. A ‘good day’ for her meant summoning

movers to change round her furniture so that she could look at the

rooms from new angles. ‘Victoria was not someone who would

rest with her stuff’ says Patrick Kinmonth (WoI Oct 2014) the

opera director and designer who helped Tessa style these post-

humous photographs just as Victoria would have wanted them

to be. ‘Someone once said that for most human beings the only

time they ever see a room is when they first walk into it. Victoria

was different. Every time she entered a room it was as if she saw

it for the first time. Her detachment made her see things clearly.

Her restless spirit was core to her creative vision.’

Venice turned out to be the ideal place for the easily bored

Victoria. She discovered this in the early 1980s when she began

renting a different palazzo every year for Christmas reunions

with her seven children. Most of them would arrive accompa-

nied by friends spouses or beaux. Venice Victoria discovered

offered the priceless bonus of encouraging all her guests to dis-

perse during the daytime only to reappear full of stories and

entertainment at the cocktail hour. In 1985 at the end of yet

another family holiday a friend suggested she come and see an

apartment that had been on the market for some time. Always

up for a new adventure and a glimpse of something beautiful

Victoria accepted. ‘It was one of those opalescent days’ she told

me years ago ‘when the city is pervaded by a thick air – not fog

but a strange mist that covers everything like a veil.’ Palazzo Per-

sico with its red façade delicately ornate windows and balco-

nies has a touch of the Orient about it that intrigued her. Built in

the 16th century it had been bought and enlarged two centuries

later she said by a family of Persian silk traders; hence the name.

When Victoria climbed the marble staircase and walked in she

discovered a series of rooms that had been brutally transformed

into anonymous-looking offices. ‘As I opened the windows to let

in the air and sunlight’ she told me ‘I heard myself saying: “I will

take it.” I was surprised by my own words.’

Jane the youngest of Victoria’s seven children an environ-

mental scientist and activist lives in Venice with her husband the

architect writer and broadcaster Francesco da Mosto and their

four children. She says Victoria’s imagination is what made her see

beauty even where it had been banished. She recalls her mother’s

excitement when razor blade in hand she uncovered fragments

of original bucolic murals buried beneath decades of varnishes in

a corner bedroom. They had been executed by Giuseppe Borsato

the same painter used by Napoleon to decorate the imperial rooms

at the Correr Palace in Piazza San Marco. For Victoria this moment

of triumph was made even sweeter by the memory of enduring an

earful from one of her sons about her having bought a palace that

didn’t even have a fresco in it.

Other long-lost treasures were the sapphire-blue decorations

on the dining-room ceiling which Victoria later emphasised with

a duck-egg-blue marmorino on the walls below and a pink granite

effect on the drawing-room walls. ‘These decorative elements

became her cardinal points’ says Jane da Mosto. ‘It gave her a

compass to pursue her own Venetian adventure.’

Indeed what Victoria Press thrived on in Venice was setting

out to find the best craftspeople – be it cabinetmakers gesso

workers or upholsterers – the city could offer. ‘There was not one

morning’ Patrick Kinmonth recalls ‘when Victoria did not come

out of her bedroom with a piece of paper on which she had

sketched a new bit of furniture she wanted to have made immedi-

ately.’ Some of these include the made-to-measure bookcases in

the drawing room a round table there on which she worked and

a series of iron-and-brass torchères copies of two 18th-century

ones she had found at auction which she placed on the sides of

the Flemish tapestries in the portego a wide elegant corridor typi-

cal of Venetian palaces. ‘It wasn’t just about having things made

it was contact with the talented people she encountered which

made this experience for her’ says Jane who through her organi-

sation endeavours to give a platform to traditional arts and crafts.

In a city whose economy is turning more and more towards mass

tourism they are increasingly crushed she says.

‘What I’m trying to do at Palazzo Persico’ says Jane who has

taken on her mother’s home ‘is to use these rooms as a showcase

for important projects in the city.’ She is involved with Mirabilia

a company that upcycles fabric from Fortuny and Bevilacqua –

their designs feature prominently in the palazzo’s upholstery. ‘My

organisation is founded on the belief that to save Venice you need

to save the Venetians’ she concludes. It’s a conviction Jane shared

with her mother and which resounds in every handmade detail –

old and new – of these interiors Victoria’s final accomplishment $

For more information visit weareherevenice.org and mirabiliavenezia.com.

‘Cheyne Walk: An Interior by Victoria Press’ an auction of the contents of her

London home will take place at Christie’s King Street on 18 Nov

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