As I sit in a vintage Mies van der Rohe chair in Emiliano Salci’s flat in Milan, looking around at the fruits of a two-year renovation, all sorts of questions spring to mind. Have the grey stone columns separating the dining and sitting areas always been there or are they part of Salci’s intervention? What about the striking matching 19th-century divans in the enormous entrance corridor? And how did he arrive at that particular shade of high-gloss aubergine paint on the walls?
But the question we’re wrestling with at present is more prosaic: what neighbourhood are we in? Salci, one half of the celebrated Milan-based Dimorestudio, looks across the glass-topped Luigi Caccia Dominioni table at his co-founder, Britt Moran. “Hmm,” says Moran. “Good question.” Salci frowns slightly. “Boh? Maybe Città Studi? Or Risorgimento? We don’t know! But what I love about it is that it’s chic without being troppo snob. There’s a real vita di quartiere. Chic, but not snob,” he says again, as if christening the neighbourhood itself.
The phrase also fits Salci, with his genial air and broad, often hilarious conversational discursions. On the sunny March day we meet, he cuts a flamboyant figure that’s a bit Galliano, a bit Adam Ant – stack-heeled black boots and all. Born in Tuscany, the architect, interior designer and former art director at Cappellini met his business partner Moran, an interior designer from North Carolina, while working on a hotel project in Shanghai. In 2003 they founded their architectural and design studio, which also produces furnishings, textile and lighting designs under the name of Dimoremilano. Their eclectic style, which is centred around the specific, high-shine glamour of the Italian ’60s and ’70s, was an instant hit with stylemakers in Milan and further afield.
He and the more retiring Moran are putting the final touches to his late-19th-century ground-floor flat, which is actually two apartments joined together. The result is an unorthodox but satisfying layout, with a series of open-living spaces flowing one into another off the long, wide entrance corridor, and two bedrooms tucked discreetly at the other end overlooking courtyards. Its walls and ceilings gleam with signature Dimorestudio high-gloss finishes, but for a duo long associated with brazen jewel tones, the colours themselves are new – the sombre aubergine on the dining room’s walls and a subtle, almost neutral camel in the entrance corridor.
The spaces are full of the layering of eras and styles for which Dimorestudio is also known. Neoclassical antiques and Asian textiles rub shoulders with greats from the 20th-century Italian pantheon – Ponti, Portaluppi, Mollino and Borsani. A few shrewdly judged statement lights, Turkish and Berber rugs and even the odd vintage panther pelt are worked in for good measure.
Though the flat feels convincingly like a residence as opposed to a show place, in truth it’s both. “This is Emiliano’s home, but we wanted a space where we could entertain people often,” says Moran. “It gives clients an opportunity to see what we can do. A presentation will have a completely different feel – you organise lunch, it’s more convivial and welcoming.” It chimes too with a new refinement of Moran’s and Salci’s roles: “We’re delegating some of the larger projects within Dimoremilano and being a bit more selective about what the two of us are doing.”
The apartment’s previous owner was a set designer at the Teatro alla Scala; he collaborated with Franco Zeffirelli and was friends with Gio Ponti. “There are probably some Ponti interventions here: the doors, a few other things,” adds Salci. It took a year to convince him to sell – a deposit had already been put down on a flat a few blocks away when Moran received the change-of-heart call – and another two years for the design to come to fruition.
A handful of structural changes were made. The original, compact kitchen became a powder room: with its leopard-patterned carpet, burnt-orange walls, black-porcelain sink and vintage ’60s Venini sconces, it’s peak Dimorestudio. A back-facing bedroom, whose French doors open on to the small courtyard, became the much larger and more elaborate kitchen (Salci is an excellent cook). The tall arched doorway connecting the entrance corridor to the sitting-dining room was repositioned by a few inches – at considerable expense and, says Moran, to the considerable exasperation of their builders – to better align it with the new design. Most notably, a wall separating the dining and original sitting room was taken down and a large window uncovered. The result is a high-ceilinged, L-shaped space, flooded with natural light (uncommon in a ground-floor flat), in which the various zones – reading, dining and relaxing – are delineated by the design itself: groups of potted palms, those original columns and the strategic placement of a few key pieces, including a vaguely Asian antique chest of drawers atop a mid-20th-century glass table.
Did Salci immediately know what he would do when he began the process? “Ni,” [the Italian for yes and no] he says. “Not deeply. Normally I’m very fast about these things. But it felt like there were a lot, almost too many, elements here. To be honest, I wanted to take out the columns at first.” In the end, they are one of the flat’s most charming quirks, not unlike the multiple niches in the walls. “I actually loved those, we kept most of them,” he adds. Their interiors are painted creamy white, subtly spot-lit and filled mostly with porcelain: exotic birds, vases and ornate tea services.
The unusually wide entrance corridor was easier to repurpose. “I love real living spaces: the areas of a house for reading, dining, television, the salotti.” So he enlisted the hallway to that purpose as well. The matching divans – surprisingly feminine forms, with curved legs and delicate white slipcovers – were sourced from vintage markets.
At the other end of the apartment the mood shifts, the volumes abruptly smaller and fully enclosed. A narrow corridor, hidden behind a leopard-print curtain, connects the two bedrooms, a vintage Paavo Tynell Concerto Series chandelier casting a warm light. The guest bedroom, like the powder room, is full-on Dimorestudio, with deep-green walls and a floor covered in teal coir fibres. The wood, satinated steel and leather bed is made up with a lavish chevron-pattern silk weave from Dimoremilano.
The master bedroom paints a softer image. The pink-tinged camel gloss on the walls is picked up in the Japanese silk bedcovering, produced by Hosoo, with whom Salci and Moran have collaborated on a textile collection that will debut at Milan Design Week. A suspended vanity unit by Piero Portaluppi hangs on one wall, next to the largest of the flat’s niches, in which is arranged a still life of vases and frames. Above it is an abstract canvas painted by Salci himself. Old, new, museum-quality and provenance unknown: the word dimore, as Moran reminds me, can refer to a grand house in Italian, and Salci’s multi-era layers of decoration faithfully mirror how Italians live in their spaces – with the past, but through a very present, discerning lens.
Back in the dining room, I have another question. Did Salci surprise himself with any of the design decisions here? He points to a row of Saori screen lights, designed in the ’70s by Kazuhide Takahama, which runs across the length of one wall in the entrance hall. Growing up in his father’s contemporary design showroom in Arezzo, Tuscany, Salci “absolutely hated” them, he says with a laugh and a self-deprecating eye-roll. Now here they are, unexpected but totally working: chic but not snob. It’s all about the edit.
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