Director David Lynch, renowned for cult classics such as Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire, and Wild at Heart, has curated an exhibition titled ‘Interiors by David Lynch: A Thinking Room’ at the Salon del Mobile fair in Milan. This venture marks a new creative endeavor for the Oscar-winning director. According to its curator, Antonio Monda, a film professor at New York University and former artistic director of the Rome Film Festival, this project isn’t entirely unexpected.
The project, entirely conceived by the filmmaker, comprises two identical rooms draped in blue velvet curtains, adorned with video projections, a prominent central throne, seven gilded cylinders, and, as per Monda, “a surprise.” The mirror-image setup, befittingly surreal for the director of art house classics like Eraserhead and Blue Velvet, as well as the iconic television series Twin Peaks and its recent Showtime sequel Twin Peaks: The Return, serves a practical purpose. With attendance at this year’s Salone anticipated to exceed 300,000, Monda explains, “so we decided to double it.”
The idea for the project originated when the design fair’s president, Maria Porro, reached out to Monda for a collaboration with a filmmaker. The curator remembered visiting Lynch at his home in Los Angeles in his role as artistic director at the Rome Film Festival. When he arrived, he found the director in his garage. “He was literally polishing a desk,” Monda says. “He told me, ‘This is what I do. I design furniture.’”
Despite his cinematic prowess, Lynch has said that his “Thinking Room” has no connection to his film and television oeuvre. “He’s very clear that the relationship is with his furniture and that other great element of his life, meditation,” Monda says. “As a professor and cinema buff, I see the same language, but he would not say that.”
