Founded by Pronzato in 2019, WE ARE ONA has built its reputation through private dinners, pop-up restaurants and design-led happenings that bring together chefs, designers, architects and artists in unexpected settings around the world. While aimed at reinforcing the connection between brands and their audiences, these ephemeral gatherings have also revealed a recurring fascination with places themselves. Casa Ideale represents the next step in that evolution: a permanent framework through which hospitality becomes a vehicle for cultural exchange rather than merely a backdrop for it.

The project's first chapter unfolds within Villa Bank, one of two villas designed by Émile Sala in the early 1970s as a highly experimental interpretation of organic architecture. Recognised by the French Ministry of Culture as part of the nation's notable twentieth-century architectural heritage, the 350-square-metre house is defined by sweeping concave and convex curves, cylindrical volumes and fluid spatial transitions. Softly rendered white stucco walls curve around gardens and terraces, while generous openings blur the boundary between indoors and outdoors, allowing the Provençal landscape to become an active participant in daily life.

In the double-height living room, a dense salon-style arrangement of photographs above a De Sede DS-600 curved sofa forms a compelling visual counterpoint to the monumental suspended copper fireplace by Max Sauze that anchors the space. Here, portraits such as Frauke Eigen's Mädchen am Strand (Girl on the Beach, 2001), Paolo Roversi's ethereal Audrey, Paris (1996), part of his long-standing collaboration with Comme des Garçons, and Jean-Baptiste Mondino's iconic image of a make-up-freee Kate Moss, Wanted (1993), reveal photography's capacity to capture both vulnerability and myth-making.

Other highlights include Philippe Halsman's playful Marilyn as Mao (1967), hung alongside Urs Lüthi's irreverent self-portrait Tell Me Who Stole Your Smile (1974) in a more intimate lounge area, creating an unexpected exchange between performance, identity and self-invention. For Sozzani, the collaboration is fundamentally about activating relationships between images and their surroundings. "The photographs of my collection enter into a narrative that connects architecture and vision," she explains. "The works become part of a living environment."

That notion of the living environment lies at the heart of Casa Ideale itself. Alongside the exhibition, which runs until October, Villa Bank will host artistic collaborations, private dinners and creative residencies, while during its opening period (1–10 July 2026) it will operate as a pop-up hotel and restaurant, the former comprising five suites, the latter helmed by Portuguese chef Gil Nogueira, whose fire-driven cuisine echoes Pronzato's long-standing interest in immersive gastronomic experiences. More significantly, Villa Bank is intended as a prototype rather than a singular destination, with additional Casa Ideale locations already in development.

If WE ARE ONA transformed dining into a platform for creative exchange, Casa Ideale broadens that ambition to encompass the entire experience of inhabiting a place. In an era when hospitality often risks becoming a matter of aesthetic packaging, Pronzato's new venture proposes a different possibility: a house as a cultural organism, continuously shaped by the conversations, collaborations and encounters that unfold within it.