On a cloudy afternoon in Milan, Matteo di Montezemolo bursts into the Ballantyne cashmere shop very, very late for our meeting and apologizes profusely many, many times. CEO of a multimillion-dollar furniture and fashion business, the 31-year-old entrepreneur has not fallen far from the family tree: His father, Luca Cordero di Montezemolo, is one of the most powerful businessmen in Italy. Chairman of Fiat, he resurrected the company's flailing Ferrari division in the 1990s and is stepping down as chief of the Confindustria, the country's leading association of industries.
Like his charismatic father, Montezemolo wears a white handkerchief peeking out of the pocket of a formal dark suit, which only accentuates his youthful and enthusiastic demeanor. Although Montezemolo clearly has the confidence and charm of someone brought up in an elite Italian family, these are tempered by an American directness. "My mother is from New York," he explains, "and she passed on to me one of the most fantastic aspects of the American mentality — freedom."
Montezemolo also believes that life is better — and less boring — if you have to fight for what you want, so in 2002 he convinced his father to form the private equity company Charme Investments. Following a year at Goldman Sachs, Matteo wanted to start a family business — a very Italian tradition. "My father has been a fantastic manager for other families: Fiat is not ours, Ferrari is not ours. Charme is something I would like to pass to my son." (Married last September, he and his wife, Ludovica, just had a baby in February.)
Montezemolo wasted no time buying up companies representing the full spectrum of high-end furniture design, starting with Poltrona Frau, makers of luxurious handcrafted pieces and owners of the Austrian company Gebrüder Thonet Vienna, the creator of classic bentwood furniture. Later came Cassina, which has produced many icons of 20th-century design, including the sleek leather 1976 Cab side chair, designed by architect Mario Bellini and part of MoMA's permanent design collection, and the more contemporary and trendy Cappellini, which has launched the careers of many young designers.
"I remember when I was young, looking at the Vanity Fair chair, by Poltrona Frau, in our house in Rome as if it was a sculpture, something fantastic. And today, after 75 years, it still seems incredibly modern," Montezemolo says. "Another incredible design I grew up with is the Ballantyne argyle: It was my first cashmere sweater when I was 10 or 12 — like a boy's first tie." Expanding Charme's reach into fashion, he acquired the Scottish firm in 2004.
Montezemolo is one of a new breed of moguls who are marketing their own lifestyles — in essence, selling the things they want to buy. "These brands have been on the high end of the market for many years, and they need to stay up there," he explains. But that doesn't mean they can't be mixed together with well-designed pieces at the other end of the scale. "In my house I have Poltrona Frau and Cassina, and I have Ikea — and they work perfectly in different rooms and situations. What I don't like is in the middle, because you don't understand what it is."
