Via del Carmine
Place: Brera, Milan · Building: historic palazzo · Scope: full renovation and interiors, from the first demolition to the last curtain
Material palette: Kerakoll Color Collection – floors, walls and showers · Walnut – full-height wardrobes · Fabric – panelled living-room walls · Burgundy lacquer – dining table and side tables · Brass – lighting
A home in a historic palazzo, where colour is used as architecture and light as an obsession.
The owner was not looking for a magazine apartment. She wanted a place that would represent her and welcome her every evening, when the door closes and the city stays outside. We followed the project for months, from the first demolition to the last curtain, and today it is lived in.
We worked by insertion, not erasure. The ceiling heights, the rhythm of the windows and the panels beneath the sills stayed where they were; the new enters like furniture, in precise volumes that talk to what was already there without overpowering it.
How it was made
The palazzo first
Every project in the historic centre begins on the stairs: a cast-iron balustrade, a wooden handrail worn smooth by hands, a painted frieze that follows the flight floor after floor. The apartment belongs to this building, not the other way round.
Then there is what you see from the windows: Lombard brick walls, terracotta roof tiles, copper gutters oxidised by time. Here Brera is not looked at from a distance, it is lived in, and every colour inside was chosen with that view in mind.
Colour as architecture
The heart of the project is colour, and the Kerakoll Color Collection let us use it the way we wanted: the same shade can live on resin floors, painted walls and finished surfaces. We worked in colour blocks, with full, continuous fields that wrap a room instead of decorating it. No grout, no tiles, no edges to interrupt the eye.
In the main bathroom a deep blue-grey, almost mineral, rises from the floor up the walls and into the shower, while the vanity in a stronger petrol blue says the same note out loud. In the second bathroom the register flips: a warm terracotta pink covers walls and floor, and the floating vanity is lacquered in the same tone, almost disappearing into the wall.
In the living area colour is more measured but does not disappear. On a base of warm greys and fabric-covered panels, the only full accent is a lacquered burgundy on the dining table and the side tables: a red that brings indoors the terracotta seen from the windows.
An obsession with light
If colour is the heart of this home, light is its breath. We studied every room at different hours, watching the morning sun slide across the walnut and the afternoon light set the terracotta on fire beyond the glass. Long grey voile curtains, from ceiling to floor, filter the light of Milan into something soft and diffuse.
Artificial light was written point by point: a brass pendant with layered blades over the dining table, a vertical brass and opal-glass wall light, a floor lamp like a shaft of solid light. Then the light you do not see: minimal recessed spots, grazing cuts that draw a diagonal across a door, blades that make the grain of the wood vibrate.
Materials to touch
Walnut first: full-height wardrobes whose grain runs from one door to the next without interruption, with handles that are simple vertical grooves cut into the wood. Around it, strip oak parquet, ivory bouclé on sofa and chairs, the deep gloss of the burgundy lacquers and the warmth of brass.
Fabric walls
The living-area walls are lined in fabric panels, a weave that absorbs light and sound and makes the room quieter. Doors and storage hide inside that grid: the home has plenty of space to put things away, but never declares it.
Next project
Porta Vercellina