3
The moment we remove the white drapes covering the sleeping furniture in a
summerhouse, we travel back in time. To our childhood days that promised us we
would be explorers who discovered all kinds of hidden treasures in the wildly
overgrown garden. We recall the secret of how to do a perfect dive into the lake.
And we remember the endless dinners we enjoyed together with our friends sitting
at long tables decorated with flowers in the shade of an old familiar tree – a tree
with messages from lovers still engraved in the bark from every year we came.
We think back to the times we sat around open fires telling each other spooky stories
that ended up scaring us too, to the point that we felt afraid of walking alone in
the dark.
We would lie wide awake at night, because it was too warm to sleep, and we
listened with closed eyes to the soothing hum of the cicadas. All this comes back to
mind on the first day as we bring up a chair to that special place where we know
that the sun will shine until late afternoon – to read the book we brought along, with
the knowledge that our reading pleasure will be doubled in the sun. Simply the feel
of the soft grass beneath our bare feet is enough to make us never want to wear
shoes ever again. Unless we are hiking, of course, and reading maps, an art we have
not practiced since our days as Boy Scouts.
We hunt for meaning in the great outdoors – something that has to a great extent
disappeared almost unnoticed from our daily life. Back in the days when we played
outside in the woods and fields all day long, everything was meaningful. Putting
our hands in the soil, planting a tree or simply trying our luck at fishing brought us
closer to the way we are meant to be: creatures not only able to read in the sun, but
also able to find their way through deserts and navigate the oceans just by looking
up at the starry sky at night. Nature is a language that we used to speak quite
fluently. So we enjoy it on every precious day we can – when we are granted the gift
of warm weather. We carry our beautiful memories inside of us – moments that help
us to truly understand why elephants never forget a thing.
This Villa was built in 1961 by the architects Werner and Grete Wirsing as a weekend retreat for Richard Roth high
above the shores of Lake Como in northern Italy near the city of Menaggio. The picturesque hillside property with
a dock down at the waterfront had all the right architectural and natural features to set the stage for the entire
outdoor collection by Vitra: a story consisting of images that show us the beauty of life in the open.
