Interior designer Nicolò Castellini Baldissera's Tangier house is an elegant melting pot of styles

Nicolò seems cast from an 18th-century tale: handsome, worldly and cultivated. He is a decorator who furnishes his homes with the curiosity of a beginner and the attention to detail of Linnaeus.

Casa Tosca, his Tangier residence, is a slim 1930s building overlooking a small square at the beginning of the Marchane plateau. This traditional Moroccan home was closed in on itself, but, through careful renovation done entirely by Nicolò, it has been transformed into somewhere light that opens onto a lush garden and far-reaching views of the Strait of Gibraltar. Casa Tosca is as cosmopolitan as the city in which it stands and the man who inhabits it.

The large linen sofas in the drawing room, loaded with ikat silk cushions, and the elegant French armchairs evoke a Milanese childhood in beautiful homes filled with 19th-century furniture, where people talked, ate, and drank well. In fact, Nicolò comes from a prominent Lombard family; his father, Piero, is a successful architect, as was his great-grandfather, the famed Piero Portaluppi.

The Georgian green of the hall, the porcelain pink of the drawing room, and the mint stripes of the loggia capture the exacting and reserved vocabulary of English style and London’s aristocracy— the city where Nicolò has lived for decades. The tables, side tables, consoles, and guéridons, the silk-and-feather abatjours, and a profusion of trinkets and curiosities recall the conversation that designers Georges Geoffroy and Madeleine Castaing began in the 6th arrondissement many years ago (needless to say, Nicolò has also held residences in Paris).

This melting pot of stylistic languages recalls the years when Tangier was an International Zone. The beautifully thick garden, pressed between the house and a marble fountain clad with ancient tiles, is the resultof our collaboration (we are very dear friends). It is here that one has the feeling of having arrived in true Morocco. And yet, elements such as the parakeets in the pagoda-shaped birdcage and the giant porcelain tadpole emerging from the water fountain promptly deny it: Nicolò reminds us that, within these walls, we are in a surreal novel written with turquoise ink on the family stationery.

Inside Tangier: Houses & Gardens by Nicolò Castellini Baldissera, photography by Guido Taroni. Published by Vendome Press, available in all good bookstores and online. (September 2019, £60).

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