Secrets in Bloom
25.05.2026
The Secret Garden: Where Heritage Fabrics and Botanical Upholstery Begin
Behind the locked doors of the Fortuny Factory, a garden has been shaping artisanal textile design for over a century
Every April in Venice, the wisteria blooms for just two weeks. The Italians call the plant glicine, after a shepherdess from legend whose tears became flowers. Wisteria vines are so long-lived they have come to symbolize longevity, devotion, and love that transcends time. One specimen in Italy is over seven hundred years old; rumors claim it served as a source of inspiration for Leonardo da Vinci. At the Fortuny Factory on the Giudecca, the vines have spent the winter as bare grey tangles wrapped around the antique columns at the heart of the garden, and then, in a single sustained exhalation, they flower—cascades of pale violet falling from the pergola in clusters so dense they soften the outline of the stone beneath. These are the blooms that directly inspire our textile design.
“It is so glorious when it is in,” says Mickey Riad, whose family has overseen Fortuny’s operations for 32 years. He has watched this bloom dozens of times, as a man and boy. It has never become routine.
Most people who visit the Fortuny showroom do not know the garden exists. You enter through the Factory gates, walk a corridor past locked production doors and a courtyard with a seventeenth-century well, round a low building—and then it appears: one of the largest private gardens in Venice. It is bordered by canals on three sides, boasts the tallest trees on the Giudecca overhead, and a swimming pool hidden behind the hedgerows. And there, draped across the antique columns, the glorious wisteria, and the flowers and foliage that have inspired a century of hand-printed fabric design.
The Countess used to show fabrics to clients in a salon whose doors opened directly here. The garden has always been the first showroom — and the most honest one.
From Convent to Factory
Our garden began as part of a convent. The well in the courtyard, recently dated to the seventeenth century, once provided water for the sisters who lived here. When the religious order departed, the property passed through other hands before Mariano Fortuny moved in during 1919, establishing his textile production on the site. The Giudecca at that time was an industrial island—the Molino Stucky, now a Hilton hotel, was the largest wheat mill in the world, and the waterfront housed breweries, watch factories, and garment workshops. Fortuny arrived with his printing presses and his fascination with light, color, and surface. The garden came with the property. He fell in love with it.
That decision—to preserve a garden inside a factory, on an island where every square meter of ground served production—fortified our connection with the natural world and the textiles we produce inside. Fortuny was already drawing on botanical forms for his printed patterns, already studying the way Venetian light fell across surfaces of different textures. The garden has remained a living laboratory, just steps from our printing tables.
The Countess and the Garden
After his death, Countess Elsie Lee Gozzi took over the company and made the garden her own. She installed the swimming pool. She became known for taking a fifteen- to twenty-minute swim every morning before going to work to the Factory. She cultivated a kitchen garden, growing vegetables for meals prepared for the workers by a chef she kept on staff. She hosted events on the lawn (we still have old black and white photographs of parties she threw there). And she showed luxury fabric to clients in a salon attached to an outdoor patio with glass sliding doors that opened directly onto the grounds. From there you could smell the roses. Riad says:
“To be able to show our fabrics in natural light—not just any light, but the Venetian light. That’s where they look their best. There is just something really special about seeing them in the garden, next to the Factory where they were produced. That’s when they are in top form.”
We still remember his first visit in 1986, at the age of twelve, when the Countess flew his family to Venice. She had been trying for years to convince his father to take over the company. Riad recalls: “He is the only person she ever brought in that was not one of the workers. The Count who lived at the Factory with her was never allowed in. She said that he talked too much.” What Riad remembers from that first visit is not the Factory. It is the garden—chasing lizards with his brother and sister, racing snails along the flagstone paths, and the feeling of something he could not quite name. “This mystery and this mystique that surrounds it,” he says. “You hear the workers, you hear the machines, you know that things are going on behind those doors. And then the last thing you expect is this beautiful, lush garden.”
One of the largest private gardens in Venice. Most visitors never know it exists. The statue has been watching the wisteria bloom — and the artisans work — for over a century.
How the Garden Shaped the Textiles
Botanical upholstery fabric is often treated as a stylistic category—floral, decorative, traditional. Here, we operate differently. In our craft, botanical patterns are not designed from library books. They have blossomed, in many cases, from what was already growing on the property. The Edera pattern takes its form from the evergreen ivy that climbs the garden walls—creeping vines, delicate tendrils, and the small bitter fruit that hangs from its branches. Cimarosa, named for the eighteenth-century Neapolitan composer, translates the garden’s abundant floral blossoms into a rhythmic repeat. Papiro, a simpler teardrop scallop motif drawn from Mariano Fortuny’s early sketches, suggests the reedy marshes of the lagoon visible from the garden’s southern edge. Even Barberini—whose oversized flowers and dramatic foliage recall the secret gardens of Roman nobility—echoes this place: a hidden garden concealed from the streets, where beauty is cultivated behind walls.
“There is an endless source of inspiration there,” says Riad. “Shape, foliage, color.”
Closing the Loop
About 10 years ago, we undertook a restoration of the garden with a Venetian countess named Tudy Sammartini, and a landscape designer. Their approach inverted the usual relationship between nature and design: rather than simply restoring what had been there, they selected new plantings whose forms echoed the motifs in our heritage fabrics. Ivy to mirror Edera. Roses to correspond with the florals printed inside. The garden became a living catalogue of the patterns it had inspired. “You see the fabrics in the showroom, and then you go into the garden,” Riad explains. The loop closes. Art imitates life, and vice versa.
The canals on the garden’s south and west borders produce the same reflected, diffused light that has shaped Venetian painting for centuries—and that shapes the way our textiles are developed and tested. A botanical pattern printed in this environment is shaped, whether consciously or through accumulated instinct, for the kind of light that enters rooms near water: soft, indirect, constantly shifting. This is why these designs translate into interiors with a quality that digitally generated patterns often lack. They carry the light conditions under which they were conceived.
The Glicine pattern, printed on cotton. The wisteria blooms for two weeks each April. The fabric endures indefinitely.
After the Bloom
By the first week of May, the wisteria petals have fallen. They collect along the flagstone paths and at the base of the columns, a brief violet drift that fades to brown within days. The garden does not end with its most spectacular moment—the ivy holds the walls; the laurel and lavender carry the air through summer; the roses open in their own time. But the show is over.
Inside the Factory, nothing changes. The same machines Fortuny designed continue to print. The same methods, guarded behind locked doors, produce the same metallic- embellished cottons and velvets they have produced for over a century. Workers apply color to cloth using formulas refined across generations. The wisteria will bloom again next April, and the next one after that, until the end of time. The Glicine pattern, printed on cotton, will outlast any single season.
For designers working with botanical upholstery fabric, the question is environmental as much as aesthetic. Where was the pattern conceived? Under what light? In what conditions of observation? At Fortuny, those conditions have remained constant for over a century. From Glicine and Edera to Cimarosa and Barberini, each pattern carries the imprint of the Giudecca garden—its light, its seasons, its discipline of observation.