It's noon on a Friday in Milan, and Max Bernardini, the formidable 37-year-old watch dealer and purveyor of what he calls il vintage di lusso, or luxury vintage, is entertaining a guest in his balcony office. The comfy perch overlooks an airy showroom teeming with old-school Hermès, Goyard, Gucci, and Vuitton steamer trunks, brawny leather Chesterfields, potted palms with cascading fronds, and glass display cases housing, like the storied Wunderkammern of yore, all manner of manly curios—from silver Dunhill Rollagas lighters to Rolex chronometers—all laid out by decade.
You'd think it might be a bit early for a sundowner, but Signor Bernardini has commandeered a bottle of amber rum—its label obscured by a meaty hand—from the shop's resident majordomo (there's a little bar setup down below) and is splashing the piratical elixir into a pair of otherwise innocent Cokes on ice. "Would you consider this rude?" he asks, in his slightly gruff, slightly bemused, slightly conspiratorial voice that suggests a good-natured and extremely polite bear snapping out of a long hibernation. "You don't mind if I smoke, do you?"
At the corner of Via Caradosso and Corso Magenta, a stone's toss from Bramante's cinquecento Santa Maria delle Grazie and its refectory, which houses The Last Supper, Bernardini's negozio is a welcome throwback to an era before sensitivity training and surgeons general's warnings: It's an oasis of high-end testosterone, a veritable museum of gentlemanly accoutrements—mostly from the Edwardian and Deco periods—presented in an atmosphere that's more smoking club than Geneva bank vault. "We wanted to make a men's temple," Bernardini says, rattling the ice in his Cuba libre as he goes on to explain that his well-burnished Italian Deco desk, topped with crocodile-skin blotter, once sat in a fascist army recruiting office in the 1930s. (The extended Crocodylidae family is well represented at Bernardini, from nubbly cocktail sets to eye-popping Hermès vanity cases.) "Our philosophy is that the search for excellence in the 1920s and '30s was much superior, much more precise than today. For one simple reason: A rich guy in the 1930s, that was his job—to be rich. Today a rich guy passes 90 percent of his time maintaining his richness." It's the mission of Bernardini—the man and his shop—to bring a little gentility back to the work of being a gentleman.
