When Paris-based artist and designer Mattia Bonetti needs a break from city life, he heads straight for Lake Lugano in southern Switzerland. There, a discrete lakefront property awaits the Swiss-born maker, a personal hideaway full of family treasures and his own delightful designs.

Bonetti has been a mild-mannered presence on the collectible design scene for more than four decades, his work arguably much louder than the man himself. Unafraid of color, ornament or whimsy, his designs are rich in historical references—a rococo flourish here, an Art Deco nod there—though always decidedly contemporary when taken as a whole.

Bonetti’s furniture, lighting and objects can be found in the collections of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York, and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, among others.