Saturday 17 December 2016

IN MEMORIAM / Alberto Pinto




Alberto Pinto was born in Casablanca to Argentine parents and was surrounded with diverse cultures. He attended Ecole de Louvre in Paris and then moved to New York to start a photography agency. His photography agency specialized in decoration and interior design. This focus on design led Pinto to take up interior design almost four decades ago


The seventeenth century private residence at the Place des Victoires in Paris was the home of Pinto's interior design and decoration agency. The agency consisted of 60 people who worked on the design of large scale and atypical places, such as private residences, corporations, hotels, yachts, and private jets. Notable projects include the Oceanco's Yacht Y708 and the Seaside Hotel Palm Beach, in Maspalomas.

In addition to interior design, Pinto had his own home collection, complete with furniture, tableware, table linen, and home accessories. Pinto also collaborated with many home and tabletop manufacturers such as Raynaud, Pierre Frey, THG, Ercuis, Aït Manos, and D. Porthault.

Alberto Pinto Interior Design, under Linda Pinto’s management, strong of a team of 80 employees, rigorously perpetuates what made the Master’s success.

Eclecticism, luxury details and refinement remain the key words when it comes to creating entire universes for its prestigious clients worldwide: private residences, office buildings, airports, hotels, yachts and jets.

The wide range of Pinto’s style, marked by various cultural influences lets traditional and modern meet in harmony, and adapts as much to intimate rooms as to larger spaces, whether the projects be public or private. Alberto Pinto Interior Design appropriates the eclectic tastes of its international clients by adjusting the décors to suit each one, and all the while adding an elegance which creates a balance within such opulence.

Among Pinto’s clients the Royal Family of Saudi Arabia as well as Qatar, along with many other important private clients around the world for whom residences have been designed and decorated in the United States, Brazil, the Middle-East, Morocco, Tunisia, France and Europe.

Other projects can be counted such as numerous hotels including The Lanesborough, the Dorchester in London, the Grand Park Hotel in Gstaad, the villa Rose-Pierre of the Grand Hôtel in Cap Ferrat, the Hostellerie de Plaisance in Saint-Emilion, la Residencia and the Palm Beach in the Canary Islands.

Alberto Pinto Interior Design has also designed the interiors for many private jets – Boeing BBJ 737, Boeing 747-8, Bombardier, Airbus A319 CJ – as well as 10 of the 100 largest yachts in the world.







Remembering AD100 Designer Alberto Pinto
Remembering the AD100 designer renowned for his opulent, grand-scale interiors

TEXT BY
MITCHELL OWENS
Posted October 31, 2012

AD100 interior decorator Alberto Pinto, who died in Paris on November 5 at the age of 69, left a polished, protean legacy in the design world. The projects that came out of his 70-person Paris office were often swashbucklingly dynamic, replete with overscale patterns, bold color schemes, and sumptuous appointments that found favor with Middle Eastern royals and international captains of industry. A study in Cairo was paneled with wood inlaid à la parquet de Versailles, while a Geneva dining room’s Louis XVI scheme seemed to await the arrival of Marie Antoinette.
Sleek, space-age minimalism was part of his portfolio, too, as evidenced by his designs for corporate headquarters, hotels, jets, and yachts (his first was for a Gucci heir). Pinto, a native of Casablanca, was especially gifted at creating seraglio-style settings, whose stained-glass light fixtures and carved plaster were inspired by traditional North African interiors—and are featured in his 2004 book, Orientalism (Rizzoli, 2004), one of several volumes about his work.
In fact, very few styles seemed beyond his talents. Pinto explained in the October 1992 issue of AD, “I have no specific style or period that I am especially fond of,” adding, however, that he was enamored with “immense rooms, partly because I pride myself on knowing how to bring together immensity and comfort. Most people are afraid of houses on a grand scale, but I’ve always been completely at home in them.” Which perhaps explains why royals from the Middle East flocked to his door when it came time to decorate a new palace.
For admirers who could only dream of hiring Pinto for a full household makeover, he also created covetable tableware for Ercuis and Raynaud, fabrics for Pierre Frey, and table linens for D. Porthault. Some of these items, along with signature collections of gutsy contemporary furniture, lighting, and accessories, are sold in Pinto’s showroom at 14 rue du Mail in Paris, which will continue under the guidance of his sister and business partner, Linda Pinto.


Step Inside Linda Pinto's Luxurious Parisian Apartment
After Linda Pinto inherited the lavish Paris apartment of her brother, legendary designer Alberto Pinto, she remade its interiors to reflect her elegant yet relaxed sense of style

TEXT BY
FERNANDA EBERSTADT
PHOTOGRAPHY BY
RICARDO LABOUGLE
Posted April 30, 2015·Magazine

The celebrated decorator Alberto Pinto, whose clientele included American financiers, European aristocrats, and Middle Eastern royalty, was as famed for his opulence as for his exacting standards. Those qualities were evidenced not only in his indelible interiors but also in his luxurious lines of furniture, lighting, china, and table linens. And Pinto’s own Paris home—outfitted with Louis XVI chairs, 18th-century Chinese red-and-gold-lacquer furniture, and scenic wallpapers—was the embodiment of his baroque style.
On the morning Pinto died, in November 2012, he asked his sister and longtime business partner a favor. “He said, ‘I want you to move into my apartment,’” recalls Linda Pinto, the vibrant woman who now heads the interiors firm Cabinet Alberto Pinto. “I said, ‘Don’t ask me that, it’s too hard.’”
The siblings, born and raised in Morocco, “had a very symbiotic relationship,” Linda explains. “We weren’t just brother and ­sister—we’d worked together for years, and I was with him at every step of his illness. I already lived in the building next door, but Alberto said, ‘Please. That way we can stay together.’ So I said, ‘Okay, but I have to do it my way.’”
In Linda’s hands, the apartment, which overlooks the Seine in the elegant 7th arrondissement, has been pared back to a more relaxed classic-contemporary style better suited, she says, to her “simple, family-centered life.” Every weekend her five grandchildren come over to watch movies, and on Sunday evenings she often plays cards with friends. “People always say it’s so serene here,” she remarks.

Although its neutral-tone wall treatments suggest an uncluttered purity, the place nonetheless brims with beloved ­objets—most notably, Linda’s menagerie of bronze chimpanzees, cloisonné zebras, and parrots made of coral, ivory, and silver. Indeed, materials seem to have an almost talismanic importance to the designer. Lamps, bowls, and candlesticks made of rock crystal abound. “It’s a noble material, but simple,” she says. “And crystal averts the evil eye!”
Though the entrance hall was redone in a breezy, streamlined fashion, with abstract carved-plaster paneling, the first thing that greets you is almost comically round and heavy: Menine, a four-foot-tall Manolo Valdés bronze figure with a bell-shaped skirt, named for one of the ladies-in-waiting from Diego Velázquez’s painting Las Meninas. “She is my guardian ­spirit—generous, strong,” Linda says. “I love round shapes. I touch her bottom whenever I pass.” A gold chain hanging from the statue’s neck bears an early-19th-century penca de balangandãs, a collection of protective charms of the kind once accumulated by Brazilian slaves.
The living room contains a mixture of 20th-century art, including paintings by Wilfredo Lam and Roberto Matta, and exquisitely crafted decor, such as matching Ado Chale bronze cocktail tables. Covered in a mother-of-pearl-like finish, the walls and ceiling bounce back the Seine’s soft reflections. The taupe taffeta curtains are hand-painted and embroidered with Japanese-style flowering branches. Many of the furnishings showcase such Asian references: The doors of a 1940s cabinet are in fact panels from an antique Coromandel screen, while two ’20s gilded bergères are backed with black-and-gold-lacquer paintings of pagodas and fishermen.



Alberto Pinto: Signature Interiors
October 25, 2016
by Anne Bony (Author), Linda Pinto (Introduction), Hubert de Givenchy (Foreword)


A lavish tome featuring the completed interiors of the master decorator’s final creations from around the globe. Revered as one of the greatest decorators of the twentieth century, Alberto Pinto made his distinctive mark on the world of interior design thanks to his style, his extraordinary perception, and his perpetually renewed inspiration. This new volume presents the latest creations by Cabinet Alberto Pinto in its luxurious, comfortable, generous, and modern signature style, revealing singular interiors that have never been seen before—sumptuous hôtels particuliers, lavish apartments, historical residences, and even a Middle Eastern palace—all of which reveal the quintessential Alberto Pinto style.

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