Every week the neighborhood market takes shape just below, along a street that links the longest commercial strip in Europe (Buenos Aires–Monza) to Parco Trotter, where the first Italian airship landed.
In what was once the mechanical outskirts and is now NoLo, lives the city of those who crave the city and love its bustle.
Here, two young lovers of dance have chosen to embrace its rhythms and syncopations: he a DJ, she a soloist at Teatro alla Scala.
They do so inside a building constructed in the 1930s which, in its sobriety, almost conceals the graffiti on its façade, yet inside reveals a surprising material richness in the common spaces, along with the beauty of high ceilings and generously sized windows.
The apartment they found had the typical layout of those years: the entrance consisted of a central corridor whose five doors opened onto three rooms, a small kitchen, and a narrow bathroom. Each of the three rooms — the dining room, the living room, and the bedroom — had its own cement tile floor.
On this already-filled notebook, the time had come to trace a new story, one made of light and of that spatial freedom that dance so thirsts for.
Thus, the corridor disappears, and the freed-up space becomes part of the main stage of the new home: a large living area facing the street is born, the result of merging two rooms, designed to showcase the most joyful activities of domestic life.
The areas of the house dedicated to rest and study are reduced to the bare essentials and face the inner courtyard.
Separating these two worlds is a single sculptural gesture: a wall that, in a zig-zag, positions itself in the space like a curtain.
Delicately resting against its concave forms, two handcrafted doors embrace its edges. The handles, made of solid oak, are inspired in both design and function by the world of Japanese joinery.
When closed, there are only two of them—just like the inhabitants of this house and the wall lamps beside them. Yet the magic of their hinges and joinery allows them to open onto four different spaces.
The first, the one closest to the entrance, opens on one side to a small study and on the other to a storage room.
The second reveals, on one side, the bedroom and on the other, a small and precious cloakroom.
Two doors for four rooms.
Confirming the house’s ambiguous character, suspended between segregated and fluid space, is the floor. A soft sea of white cement resin unites all the rooms and embraces four rugs — the original cement tiles and two wooden parquet floors — which recall the rooms’ original layout and preserve the memory of the house.
The kitchen is open and an integral part of the large living area. The satin-finished steel panels contrast with the most elaborate of the cement tile rugs, characterized by stark black-and-white patterns. The countertop and backsplash are bromine-colored, as is the upper cabinet beside the window with a balcony.
This element, pleasant to the touch, conceals all the house’s technical installations in a single gesture: the refrigerator, the independent heating system, and, on the cloakroom side, the laundry area with washer and dryer.
The bedroom, in addition to the generous walk-in closet, features an en suite bathroom, whose brightness is hidden by a sliding panel painted the same color as the walls. In this small space, the light highlights the pink and aqua tones of the silipol cladding, an iconic material of Milanese design, associated with the M1 metro line.
The small cloakroom also makes use of it, in this case in the cooler tones of green and blue, which contrast with the warm color and grain of the oak veneer on the doors.
Although this room is meant to remain windowless, it actually receives plenty of light through the frosted glass of a “through” shower shared by the two bathrooms.
CREDITS:
Client: Private
Type: Apartment
Location: Milan, Italy
Year: 2024.12
Area: 68 m²
Project Design: ATOMAA
Project Team: Umberto Maj, Andrea Del Pedro Pera, Cesare Galligani, Giulia Barilli, Kostantinos Ballis
Photographer: Alberto Strada
Special Drawings: Andrea Accorsi
Handcrafted Ceramic Vases: atelier.situ
Collaborators:
Contractor: Relazioni Edili RE
Carpenter (bespoke furniture): Donghi Arredi
Windows: Fratelli Bergamaschi
Doors: Donghi Arredi
Kitchen: Donghi Arredi
Floor Renovation: Mosaic Factory