“I don’t do politics,” says Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi, with a grin. The founder of property practice Banda is sitting in the kitchen of one of his newly completed town houses in Leinster Square, Bayswater. As the husband of Princess Beatrice, politics is off limits. He’s softly spoken, even as he vents his frustrations with successive governments that he says have made the UK “unviable” for boutique property developers like himself. Adapting has proven essential, which has in turn led to the recent launch of Banda Gallery, a shoppable curation of art, furniture and homewares.
Mozzi worked in construction before he launched the residential property development firm in 2007, aged 23. But after seven years, the business pivoted. “Land prices went up every single year, planning took years to get and construction costs went up,” he says. “You weren’t able to buy anything and make a return, and certainly you weren’t able to buy anything and deliver the kind of quality that we wanted to in terms of design.” The company moved away from development, and architectural and interior design became core. Mozzi also decided to look beyond the UK and take the company global. Today, he is both CEO and creative director.
Banda now has projects in New Delhi, Milan, the Alps, LA and the Hamptons. There are two strands: Banda bespoke, which works with individual clients (“international business leaders, tech entrepreneurs and finance people”) on their homes; and, as the second strand, there are the big design projects such as Admiralty Arch and Chelsea Barracks where the developers — Qatari Diar, in the case of the latter — call on Banda for design, architecture, construction and visualisation.
The company employs 65 people at its London HQ; headcount has doubled in the past four years. But its network of suppliers and makers stretches all over the world. “There’s so much creative talent in the UK,” Mozzi says. “We can recruit that here and then work globally.” Post pandemic, clients are happy with this, he says. “No one asks, ‘where’s your local office?’ any more.”
As such, Mozzi describes himself as “always on a train” — between design projects, as well as antiques-sourcing trips to auctions in Belgium, France and Italy. Banda’s ethos is to create “design for living” — which nods to Le Corbusier’s 1927 notion of the house as “a machine for living” but places design on a par with functionality.
This is part of a wider shift in attitudes, where “art is placed at the forefront of [interior design] decisions rather than seen as a finishing touch”, says Georgia Spray, founder of art platform Partnership Editions. When sourcing art for clients, “we’re now brought in at the beginning of a project,” she says. “The approach is more holistic.”
Spray is in the midst of renovating her own home, a Victorian terrace in Stoke Newington. The Banda Gallery concept appeals: the idea of investing in a couple of pieces that allow you to introduce a designer’s aesthetic without going all-in. Spray picks out a plinth made from Italian oak, listed at £300 — around the entry point for the collection, which stretches into the tens of thousands. “It would be an amazing place to display ceramics or sculpture,” she says.
“Banda Gallery is a project that’s been in my mind for five or six years,” Mozzi says. The collection will be available online and includes antiques, Banda-designed furniture, and artworks made in collaboration with its artists-in-residence, such as Matthias Fabre and Marco Acri. Many are on display in the Leinster Square town house, a free-flowing space that incorporates the ground floor and two levels below.
Big basements and big developments don’t always spell interesting interiors, but here each room feels considered. Textures are tactile — wool headboards, marble coffee tables and a lamp made from paper. In the master bedroom is a great tub of a chair — a bespoke Banda design reupholstered in chocolate mohair.
On the walls contemporary art mixes with the traditional — a vast Fabre painting shares a room with a small Dutch oil portrait. In the children’s bedroom, an Alice Palmer fabric embroidered with lemons creates a bed canopy; a fluted 1950s glass light was sourced in Milan. The blending of old and new is key. “Design is important to your emotional state,” says Mozzi, who moved house multiple times in his childhood.
Mozzi lights up when we come to an antique rosewood desk by mid-century Brazilian designer, Joaquim Tenreiro. He finds “beauty in the imperfections” and runs his hands over the wood — now a protected species — that has a rich patina and a red colouring.
Interior designer Anna Haines has her eye on a number of pieces for her clients, in particular the slipper chair, “a lovely design that has been stitched beautifully. Banda designs are classically elegant,” she says, also praising the antiques’ meticulous restoration work.
In the Banda world, even the antiques have been shined up. Across every project there’s a certain mood; a cocoon of good taste. Possibly it’s rather intimidating to live with? Mozzi looks blank. “This will all age and get better with time,” he says, gesturing around at a room that positively gleams. This is just the beginning.
This article has been amended since publication to correctly attribute the chairs in one of the photographs to Pierre Jeanneret
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