What Care Keeps · A Minotti Sofa · What Remains, Lucerne
Sketch of the vintage Minotti sofa · 200 × 100 × 50 cm · Lucerne · 2026 / Curation: VV Interior Home by Valeria Viollaz · vvinteriorhome.com ·
I. Beginning from Within
CLEANOW — ZURICH
A restoration does not begin with new fabric. It begins with what that fabric will cover.
Before it was dressed again, the sofa was deep-cleaned by Cleanow, a Zurich team working with environmentally conscious products. It is the step no one will see in the exhibition, and yet the one that holds everything else in place. A Minotti piece is made to last for decades. That promise is kept only when those who receive it care first for its interior, and only then for its appearance.
It would be easy to call this maintenance. It is closer to respect. Cleaning is the most ordinary thing we do for the objects we live with, and perhaps for that reason the most revealing. It shows whether we see our furniture as surfaces to be kept presentable, or as companions whose life depends on our attention.
That difference does not show in a photograph. It shows in fifty years.
Antique linen, circa 1920, during the restoration process · Lucerne · 2026 / Curation: VV Interior Home by Valeria Viollaz · vvinteriorhome.com · Photography: Valeria Viollaz
II. Accompanying, Not Correcting
ATELIER BRUN — SURSEE
To restore is not to erase. It is to accompany an object from one chapter of its life into the next, without asking it to pretend it has no past.
At Atelier Brun, Aline Brun is reupholstering the sofa in antique linen, circa 1920, a fabric that lived a century before it met this frame. We prepared the linen ourselves, in the studio. In the atelier, the work lies in the finishes: the right tension in the weave, every seam and every edge resolved without haste, so that the clean line of Minotti and the noble irregularity of the linen can live together.
The intention was never to make the sofa look new. It is to let two histories meet: a modern Italian structure, and a textile that carries the time of those who wove it.
Antique linen, circa 1920, awaiting the restoration of the Minotti sofa · Lucerne · 2026 / Curation: VV Interior Home by Valeria Viollaz · vvinteriorhome.com · Photography: Valeria Viollaz
Antique linen, circa 1920, its tones shaped by a century of use and care · Lucerne · 2026 / Curation: VV Interior Home by Valeria Viollaz · vvinteriorhome.com · Photography: Valeria Viollaz
III. Responsibility as a Daily Practice
We speak often about conscious luxury: buying less, buying better, buying what endures. We speak far less about what comes after. An object meant to last a lifetime asks for a lifetime of care. Dust, light, the touch of hands, the rhythm of a household: all of it settles into the fibre and into the heart of the piece.
To clean a piece of furniture regularly, with the right hands and the right products, is not an aesthetic gesture. It is a form of responsibility toward those who made it, and toward those who will inherit it.
This is why, at VV Interior Home, no piece arrives at an exhibition alone. It arrives accompanied by the hands that cleaned it, restored it and prepared it to be seen. Naming them is also part of curation.
PROJECT CREDITS
Presented by The mep and VV Interior Home
Works from the VV Interior Home Collection
Curation · VV Interior Home by Valeria Viollaz
Copywriter · Valeria Viollaz
Deep Cleaning of the Sofa · Cleanow
Upholstery & Finishes · Atelier Brun · Aline Brun
Linen Preparation · VV Interior Home
Photography · Valeria Viollaz
7 November – 2 December 2026
Press & Curatorial Enquiries · vvinteriorhome.com/contact