This article is part of a guide to Milan from FT Globetrotter
Situated between the north and the south, between central Europe and the Mediterranean, Milan is a marble box with a velvet lining. It might appear a little unforgiving on the outside, a business-like place of solid blocks under silvery skies, very different to the creamy, antique warmth of Rome, the shimmering spectacle of Venice or the operatic chaos of Naples.
It reveals itself, however, on the inside. In the half century between 1930 and 1980, Milan’s interiors were the coolest, the chicest and the most enduringly influential until they were eventually overtaken by New York lofts, Tokyo bars and Parisian hotels.
From the inventive, exquisitely tailored interiors of Italian architect Piero Portaluppi, encased in marble and veneer, to the quirky, highly personal apartments of some of the city’s great designers, a surprising number of domestic interiors have survived and are open to the public as museums, galleries and lobbies. In most wealthy cities, interiors last barely a generation but in Milan they are often so well designed or their designers so revered that they abide, and in remarkable condition. Here are a few that are well worth visiting.
Apartment lobbies
I start not with a particular place but with an archetype. In no city on earth is there a richer, more architecturally inventive zone between the public and the private, the street and the interior. The city’s apartment blocks are blessed with an incredible legacy of entryways, mostly largely visible from the street, albeit through glass (or partially glazed) doors, with some a little more public and welcoming than others. They feature a panoply of design devices, tricks and modes, from sophisticated trompe-l’oeil effects to dazzling, geometric marble inlays and lively mosaics, sculptural panels, space-age lighting sconces, theatrical porter’s desks and arty vitrines.
The best of them were gathered into a door-stopper of a book that has become a bit of a cult object among designers and architects. Entryways of Milan (Taschen, 2017) by Karl Kolbitz is a remarkable compendium of aesthetic invention. Too heavy to be taken with you but wonderful to browse.
There is the wonderful geometric pizzazz of Giuseppe Roberto Martinenghi’s Corso di Porta Nuova 20 apartment block (1937) or the lemony diamonds and Cubist stairs of Gio Ponti and Alberto Rosselli’s Casa Melandri (Viale Lunigiana 46, 1954-57). There are the fish floor mosaics of Gigiotti Zanini’s Palazzo Civita (Piazza Eleanora Duse 2, 1927-33) and the very mid-century cocktail of colours and quality materials at Via Giovanni Pascoli 21 (architect unknown, lamps by Franco Albini). And there is the restrained modernism of Angelo Mangiarotti and Bruno Morassutti’s Via Quadronno 24 (1956-62) with its space-age concierge desk.
These are private spaces but not quite entirely. Most are at least partly visible from the street through glass doors or iron gates, and you can often peek inside when they are being cleaned. Best of all, try to get invited into one of almost any of Milan’s downtown blocks — the lobby will almost certainly be reward enough.
Villa Necchi Campidoglio
Via Mozart 14, 20122 Milan
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Opening times/entry fee: Wednesday–Sunday, 10am–6pm. Adults, €15
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Website; Directions
This relatively austere-looking house (at least from the outside) might already seem oddly familiar. It has made appearances in the enjoyably overblown House of Gucci (2021) and the (slightly) subtler I Am Love with Tilda Swinton (2009).
Built in 1935 by Piero Portaluppi for two sisters, heiresses of a successful iron-foundry and sewing-machine manufacturer, it sits very comfortably somewhere between Art Deco, modernism and classicism. That rather blank façade gives way to a carefully crafted container, like the interior of a complex box replete with exotic timbers, surprising compartments and generous spaces, each impeccably tailored to its function. It is in turns camp, kitsch and stunningly modern, its atmospheres constantly flipping and surprising, veering between gentlemen’s club, modernist villa and country mansion. The corner window in the living room is perhaps its most recognisable moment, its neatly engineered frames allowing it to open fully to the garden. But there is also a touch of Hollywood glamour about its pool (the first heated private swimming pool in the city) and its lush gardens belying the house’s proximity to the centre — only a short stroll from the Duomo. Never out of fashion.
Casa Lana
Viale Emilio Alemagna 6, 20121 Milan
This transplanted interior is a delight. Salvaged by the Triennale Milano (and curator Marco Sammicheli) from its original site when the new owners wanted to renovate, it was opened in 2022 inside the city’s vast art and architecture exhibition complex. The apartment was designed in 1965 for printer and lithographer Giovanni Lana. It is an inventive, compact and ingenious reimagining of a Milanese apartment with influences from Japan to India via Scandinavia.
Its designer was Lana’s friend, Ettore Sottsass, one of the most influential of Milan’s designers and founder of the Memphis Group, which upended Italian design in the 1980s with a blast of garish, often nonsensical Postmodernism. Sottsass’s penchant for colour and surprise are already nascent here but this is a more restrained interior than we might expect, an envelope for everyday life rather than dramatic effect.
To maximise the space, Sottsass built almost everything in, a bespoke suit of an interior in which the pockets might contain sofas or desks or extensive storage for Lana’s print collection or records. Screens, slots and shelves give hints of spaces beyond so that the interior does not feel cramped or oppressive, yet its intensity is astonishing, with every item seemingly having its place. A profound contrast to the villas and sprawling, cool apartments of Portaluppi, it is a masterclass in making the most of space.
While you’re here, it’s also worth wandering the halls of the Triennale itself, a vast structure designed by, among others, Giovanni Muzio in the fascist era. Muzio (1893-1982) was one of the most inventive of Italian architects of the era and responsible for the chunky Ca’ Brütta (“Ugly House”), a Milanese corner block which merges Neo-Renaissance and a kind of proto-Postmodernism. The Triennale is an intriguing blend of stripped classical and mammoth-industrial, surprisingly contemporary in its scale and materials and featuring mosaics and murals by some of the best Italian artists of the era including Giorgio de Chirico, Marino Marini and former Futurists Gino Severini and Carlo Carrà.
Casa Corbellini-Wassermann
Viale Lombardia 17, 20131 Milan
This remarkable interior dating from 1934-36 has been restored and opened up thanks to the Massimo De Carlo Gallery, which moved its Milan headquarters here in 2019. This most domestic of spaces has become a spectacular gallery, a venue that works remarkably well for displaying art, even if a visitor might think that the often extravagant interiors could clash with the works. The opposite is the case: the rooms make the works shine.
Another work by the prolific Piero Portaluppi, the rooms here each have a particular character (some in a rather severe central European modernist idiom, others relieved by Orientalist decoration or rich materials) and each is exquisitely articulated with deeply veined marble door frames and skirtings, decorated lattice ceilings, brawny terrazzo floors, gilded highlights and shiny, chocolatey timbers. The fireplaces are exotically inventive but the rooms are otherwise surprisingly plain. The quality is in the detail rather than the decoration. Built-in cabinetry is almost invisible, the windows are in dark oak, and the hardware and light fittings are deceptively simple but profoundly elegant. This looks like an apartment that could accommodate any lifestyle.
Worth noting are the lobby walls, which bear tempera artwork from the 1930s of a map representing Milan, the landscape of the Po Valley and the family’s country estate, a chinoiserie corner chimney piece and some of the nicest built-in bookshelves and drinks cabinets I have ever seen. The bathroom isn’t part of the public spaces in the gallery but it might be worth asking if you could see it — a cocoon of green marble that resembles the sea on a dark day. Pretty much perfect. It also represents a good opportunity to look inside one of those Milanese entryways; the one here is restrained, almost a little Roman with its mixed marbles, vaguely in the Italian colours of red, white and green, and the stairs a little sepulchral but surprisingly inviting.
Gae Aulenti Apartment
Via Fiori Oscuri 3, 20121 Milan
This little wonder of ad hoc improvisation is currently only open on occasions but well worth catching if you can. Architect and designer Gae Aulenti is now best known for her 1980s conversion of Paris’s Gare d’Orsay station into an art museum, the Musée d’Orsay, but in many ways her smaller-scale designs are more successful and certainly more influential, and this is one of the best.
Her apartment has been maintained almost exactly as it was when she died in 2012 and now serves as her archive. A crowded, intense and enjoyable interior dating from 1974, it occupies the top of a historic building like a perched penthouse, looking out over the rooftops of the Brera neighbourhood, which she helped to revitalise as a designer. It is now one of the city’s most fashionable design and dining destinations.
With a gallery above (housing her office and archive), a vivid orange industrial metal stair and a stonking great steel beam running through it, the designer made the absolute maximum use of the space and, in many ways, it foreshadowed the New York loft aesthetic and the airy industrial classicism of Richard Rogers’ Chelsea townhouse. It’s stuffed with books, architectural models, prototypes, magazines and artefacts, and Aulenti created banks of shelving that act to create enclosures for more intimate spaces. It also performs as a kind of private museum of her own products (like the Pipistrello table lamp, the April folding chair and her wonderful wheeled glass coffee table), the successes and the failures, but every attempt always lively and interesting. Up above, a red steel bridge leads to a kind of 1970s urban orangery and a diminutive roof terrace. For a small apartment it contains an incredible variety of spaces, each with its own scale and atmosphere, each visible from the others in glimpses so that the spaces tantalise you into exploring. With one wall dominated by a huge Roy Lichtenstein carpet and others populated by more geometric abstract works, it somehow combines gallery, studio, loft and intimate domesticity in a counterintuitively maximalist modern manner. Wonderful.
Bar Luce, Fondazione Prada
Largo Isarco 2, 20139 Milan
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Opening times/entry fee: Monday–Friday, 8.30am–8pm; Saturday–Sunday,
9am–8pm. Free entry
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Website; Directions
In a former gin distillery in the less polished and more industrial Largo Isarco neighbourhood, Rem Koolhaas and his outfit OMA transformed a rough old series of buildings into an intriguing arts complex for Prada’s Foundation. Quirky, unusual and occasionally genuinely surprising, the buildings (notably a gold-plated tower) play with ideas of industrial rawness, luxury and taste.
In the midst of all that is a creation that blurs the boundaries between the cinematic and the real, between fashion and history. Bar Luce is a reconstruction of an idealised archetype. It is the kind of place Wes Anderson suggests he might frequent when in Italy. If it existed. Which it didn’t. So he had to design it. The bar’s pistachio- and strawberry-gelato Formica, classical wallpaper and backlit 1950s-style cake-vitrines, vinyl-seated chairs and pinball machines recall a golden era of Italian mid-century design but blended with a little of the London “caff” or the neighbourhood diner. This is a half-remembered interior that seems strangely familiar. It is deeply kitsch but also, why not. And in a city of exemplary espressos, it serves some of the best. The paninis, too, are as well stuffed and finely made as the interiors. You will leave buzzing.
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