Walnut flat
Flexible spaces and Milanese liberty style
This apartment, located in an early 1900s building in the heart of Porta Venezia in Milan, is the Milanese pied-à-terre of an Italian couple living abroad.
The renovation project is poised between the research for a contemporary space and the intent to enhance the history and soul of the apartment; the tension and the dialogue between these elements are the hall- marks of the intervention.
Once the volume of the bathroom was defined, the first operation was to free the floor plan of the house from all its internal walls. The inhabited space is then no longer divided into small rooms, but configures itself as a single fluid environment that intercepts the light entering from all the windows of the house, ex- posed in different directions.
The memory of the original house has been preserved with two precise interventions. A suspended ceiling system has been inserted to retrace the sediment of the old walls and, on the floor, the original herringbone parquet has been restored and completed. The result is a grid that discreetly identifies the different life environments of the apartment.
Two sculptural volumes in wood, Canaletto walnut essence, divide the space delimiting the functional areas and, being double-sided, relating to the different environments they face on. An integrated sliding door system allows to separate the rooms creating new scenarios inside the house.
The first device accommodates a wardrobe towards the master bedroom and presents itself in all its three- dimensionality towards the living room, hosting a bookcase. The second one, beyond containing systems, wardrobes and shelves towards the entrance, leads the eye towards the living area thanks to a graphic pat- tern of crosses that works as a flexible exposition system.
The last scenario is the large inhabited wall containing the kitchen, the wardrobes and a folding bed which, if necessary, transforms the study into a bedroom for guests. Within this neutral volume the large insert in green Guatemala marble characterizing the kitchen emerges.
