For anyone who wasn’t on Instagram and didn’t watch the extravaganza unfold in real time, the Italian fashion editor, creative director, and street-style star Giovanna Battaglia married Swedish real-estate developer Oscar Engelbert in an over-the-top celebration in Capri, Italy, this June. (Go down the rabbit hole: #gioandoscar.) There was a sunset ceremony—the bride, who grew up in Milan and has worked for such brands as Dolce & Gabbana and Carolina Herrera, wore an Alexander McQueen wedding dress with a 12-and-a-half-foot train—followed the next day by an all-night rager on a barge floating just beyond the island’s legendary Blue Grotto. When the hangovers wore off, many wondered where the couple, famed for their fabulousness in the social swirls of New York and Paris, would swap their dancing shoes for bedroom slippers. Turns out the newlyweds had a trick up their sleeve: this elegant apartment in an 1800s building on Stockholm’s Djurgården island, where Oscar was raised. What’s the one word Giovanna uses to describe time there? “Quiet!”
In renovating the three-bedroom, four-bath flat, the couple was sensitive to the structure’s 19th-century roots. It was “a restrained, modern restoration,” Oscar says. “The home is 100 percent a reflection of what we like and what we collect. Every single piece has its history of where and when we bought it.”
The duo did not use an architect or designer, instead relying on Oscar’s visual savvy—he founded Oscar Properties in 2004 and has constructed modernist buildings around the world with such architects as Rem Koolhaas and Bjarke Ingels—and Giovanna’s personal style, heretofore mostly expressed in the fashion arena. Giovanna, a contributing fashion editor at W and a senior fashion editor for Japanese Vogue, explains, “All the knowledge I have came in handy, but you have to be more careful since you can’t pin a chair to make it look good the way you can with a skirt for a photo shoot.”
By their own admission, Oscar’s design approach is cleaner and more subdued, while Giovanna usually subscribes to the more-is-more ethos. “It’s been interesting to look at the evolution of my own aesthetic since I met Oscar,” Giovanna says. “I used to think Oscar’s taste was too cold or too minimal, but I got caught up in his enthusiasm and passion, and now I really like it.”
At the same time, Oscar has learned to appreciate Giovanna’s penchant for color, notably in the sunroom they call the veranda. “I wanted natural colors, and then Gio came home with velvets from Rubelli. It was out of my comfort zone, but when it sank in I loved the idea. Now it’s one of my favorite parts of the house.” He laughs as he says that his friends—many of whom teased the couple that collaborating on their house was a bad idea—are just as surprised by the results as he is. “Miraculously, we ended up agreeing on everything!”
Much of the furniture had been collected by Oscar on his travels and locked away in storage for years. “When we started decorating, all the pieces sort of fell together. I love it because in one place I have almost all of my favorite designers, and, magically, it all worked out with the art, too,” he says of the mix of Scandinavian ceramics and pieces by French designers, including Prouvé and Royère. The ceramic stove in the dining room came with the space, though he professes they rely on it more for decoration than functionality: “We like the original charm.” Oscar first started collecting art by George Condo over a decade ago, but the painting in the living room is one of his favorites. “It has everything I like about Condo—the abstract figures and lots of colors,” he says.
The couple met in May of 2014, and Stockholm was one of the first places they visited together, taking a trip there that August. “It was like a fairytale city,” Giovanna recalls. “The light was amazing, there was lushness in the streets, and it’s so beautiful to be surrounded by water. Everywhere I looked there were swans. It was like a Magritte painting, when you can’t see where the sea ends and the sky begins.”
Now the pair will split their time between the Swedish capital and New York, where they have a loft in Chelsea. “But this is my palate cleanser,” Giovanna says. “It’s the place where I concentrate, and it’s a creative nest because of the different rhythm.”
One of Oscar’s favorite rooms is the master bath: “I sit in the Wegner chairs of the bathroom and I work, or read the morning papers, or just talk to Gio while she is getting ready.” And speaking of dressing up, Giovanna, who also wore Giambattista Valli and Prada dresses during her wedding festivities, mentions there is one room that she isn’t finished with just yet: the closet. “She’s making me build a new room for all her clothes,” Oscar says with a laugh. Allow us to provide a caption for the Instagram-post reveal: Happy wife, happy life.
