To get to architect Luca Cipelletti’s latest project, a brutalist house in Milan, it is impossible not to notice two other names on the door: Nathalie Du Pasquier and George Snowden. The designers (who happen to be husband and wife) were founding members of the radical 1980s design movement, the Memphis Group. And when Cipelletti first set foot on the penthouse windowless L-shaped Porta Nuova building, which he had been hired to make more livable, the door bearing the names of the founding father of the movement, Ettore Sottsass, and co-founder Marco Zanini.
“They were the first radicals,” Cipelletti says of the group, known for its irreverent use of crazy shapes and colors that defied notions of good taste. As a teenager in Milan in the 1980s, Cipelletti had seen many of his early exhibitions, and decades later would design a 2006 Sottsass exhibition in Tokyo, as well as the 2021 reconstruction of a Sottsass interior, Casa Lana, at the Triennale Museum, in Milan: “They didn’t always have to think regarding a role. That freedom helped me a lot in a way.”
But if you’re thinking this brutalist home is a brazen homage to radical Italian design, think once more. Cipelletti is a different kind of crazy, he insists. “My madness is in the compulsive obsession, it is more severe; it is regarding erasing things”, he likes to use the word millimeter to describe his work. And indeed, this project is regarding as obsessive regarding detail as it gets. Table tops are cut at 45-degree angles to look like paper. The marble floors and walls are combined with those of the books to look like a large covering. And a linear motif, like the frets of a guitar, runs horizontally through the apartment from the ceiling to the walls, past the shelves and floors with an almost painful precision.
The 400-square-meter L-shaped volume had high, sloping ceilings, but had no natural light, so to make it more livable, Cipelletti made a series of incisions on the front, side and roof to create a window and skylights, and added regarding 100 square meters of terrace (planted by landscape architect Derek Castiglioni ) Just following. Everything is balanced on asymmetric plaster-clad pillars that are repeated every 36 meters, for an effect that is, in Cipelletti’s words, “a bit neo-gothic and brutalist”.
“We wanted to add a lavish layer” to temper the brutalist elementsexplains Cipelletti. The walls and the floor were covered in Canaletto walnut. The main bathroom was covered with more than 5,000 kilos of forest green marble and the vanity with Brazilian fossil marble. Around the house, Cipelletti installed panels of his version of the Venetian mirror, which gets its smoky reflection quality from layers of oxidation applied to stainless steel. His client, a art collector, contributed an impressive collection of photographs, but little else, so Cipelletti took it upon himself to select a top-notch mix of art and furnishings that would complement the seriousness of the architecture and photos. Cipelletti scoured galleries, auctions, and shops to find 20th-century treasures like a rocking chair by Franco Albini, a desk and dining chairs by Gio Ponti, and a stunning bubblegum pink vase by Carlo Scarpa. Some of the pieces nod to the house’s radical Italian roots, like two totemic sculptures by Alessandro Mendini and, perhaps most obviously, a set of ten glass vases by Sottsass Vistosi, all purchased at auction.
The selection of works of art it was equally a part of the equation. Important works by Mario Schifano and Jannis Kounellis draw the eye through the volume. A Dan Flavin piece lights up the dining room. and the indisputable main dish: A light sculpture by James Turrell, commissioned for the master bedroom, functions as a pseudo headboard: “I was thinking of a new kind of canopy“He explains regarding the daring move. Everything is mixed with the owner’s photo collection, which is exhibited thematically: portraits in the room, which appear on the walls; naked in the guest bedroom. Cipelletti devised a hanging system in the room that allows the paintings to be easily moved when the client buys something new or wants to change things.
So that the place does not remain too anchored in the 20th century, Cipelletti selected some contemporary gems for the mix– A work of art lamp in the kitchen by Argentine artist Tomás Saraceno, another by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor in the dining room, and several of his own superminimal furnishings, like his paper-thin cement bookcases and a 3.5-carved dining table. meters of fossilized solid oak. In the master bedroom, a pair of 18th-century marquetry cabinets by Giovanni Battista Moroni nod to the rich history of Italian furniture making, predecessors of so many other great Italians, scattered throughout the house.
“I’m an architect and museum designer,” explains Cipelletti. Designing houses is not something he is so into: “It’s a joy to interpret someone else’s work in an unexpected way. I’ve never seen [Vittorio] Zecchin like that. I have always seen Flavin in a clean room. And I don’t think Saracino takes offense at being in a kitchen. There is a theatrical way of showing things within an idea or structure. You have these parentheses or alignments, but within them there is freedom.”
Article originally published in AD US.
Translation and adaptation of Fernanda Toral.
