Step Inside Giorgio Armani’s Two-Story Farmhouse in Italy

Giorgio Armani, the revolutionary designer who made his indelible mark on both fashion and interior design throughout his 50-year career, has died at the age of 91, his eponymous company announced on September 4, 2025. The billionaire businessman, who retained sole ownership of his company, was born on July 11, 1934, in Piacenza, Italy. Though it’s hard to imagine now, Armani’s career had humble origins: he got his start in fashion as a window dresser at a department store. In 1975, he founded his luxury fashion house in Milan. The aesthete, who was known for his obsessive attention to detail, forever changed the silhouette of office fashion when he introduced his designs for unstructured yet sumptuous suits for both men and women, popularized in the 1980 film American Gigolo, which featured actor Richard Gere dressed in head-to-toe Armani. His clothing was featured in many iconic films and television shows that followed, including The Untouchables and Miami Vice. His designs quickly became a celebrity staple on the red carpet too.

In 2000, Armani launched his interior design brand, Armani/Casa. As with his clothing, Armani favored simple yet elegant designs that emphasized practicality and a human presence in his interiors. “A home is a nest, where the most important thing is not the surroundings, but who lives there,” the designer told Architectural Digest in a 1983 tour of his home in Forte dei Marmi, Italy. “I never want to feel like an object in my own home,” he added, directly comparing his restrained design philosophy to that of his fashion sensibilities. “Interior design is something like putting on a comfortable, unstructured jacket.”

Throughout the years, Armani opened the doors of his many self-designed spaces to AD, from a 17th-century home in Switzerland laden with dark mahogany to a Far East–inspired Saint-Tropez abode. “I have fun with my homes, which have been my greatest investments. I don’t buy Picassos, I buy houses,” he said in 2015. “This is a passion I’ve had since I was young—creating ambiences that make you want to stay.” — Katie Schultz

In 2004, Architectural Digest revisited Armani’s Forte dei Marmi farmhouse, speaking with the designer about how the home had remained unchanged and about his design philosophy.

Reread the article from the December 2004 issue below.

Giorgio Armani, the designer whose creations are at the same time classic and revolutionary, represents a paradox in the world of fashion. The couturier, who eased the tailored fit of traditional clothes by inventing a relaxed, unstructured look paired with a comfortable feel, nonetheless remains a classicist, searching for an ideal of beauty by avoiding the unnecessary. Through a process of elimination, he reduces designs to elemental simplicity, producing trend-resistant pieces that never fall out of fashion.

Though Armani is best known for his sartorial innovations, he has long experimented with interiors. His calming eye easily moves between fashion design and interior design, underscoring the close, sometimes intimate, relationship between the two disciplines. For Armani, interior design starts in the home—specifically, his home, or homes, in Europe and America. His own interiors showcase forerunners of the furniture in his line Armani Casa, and the restraint of the forms that characterize pieces now on his showroom floors was evident in a house he designed in the early 1980s in Forte dei Marmi, a retreat on the Versilia coast in Tuscany (see Architectural Digest, May 1983). Some 20 years later the interior remains timeless. “The house in Forte was my first holiday home and, therefore, holds a special place in my heart,” says the designer. “I decided to decorate it with the idea of creating a cabin on the sea. I have not changed the house since then, and it has lived incredibly well over the years.”