The furniture and object designer F. Taylor Colantonio, dressed in a red-trimmed poet’s blouse, gives a gentle shove to a fluted Doric column in his small, theatrically furnished loft in the Campo de’ Fiori neighborhood of Rome. The column wobbles loose from the wall, revealing itself suddenly to be light as Styrofoam, phony as a stage set. “Everything in my house is fake,” says Colantonio. “I’m a punk collector. It’s all fake.”

In addition to working on interior design projects for private clients, Colantonio, 30, creates surrealist objects, which range from coiled-rope vases to snakelike rebar candlesticks to transparent rugs. Championed by Alex Eagle, the owner of the Store, and the design dealer Jermaine Gallacher (who both sell his work in their London boutiques), his pieces are often offbeat interpretations of chintzy suburban décor and imitations of antiquity.