Location_Ripa di Porta Ticinese, Milan
Year_2023
Area_90 mq
Client_Privato
Service_Preliminary project, executive project, building site direction
Ripa di Porta Ticinese, Naviglio Grande. Few steps away from the building where the great poetess Alda Merini lived.
Hypnos studio was called to redesign a residential unit in the typical context “di ringhiera”. The property is the result of successive and happily chaotic stratifications, including a series of rooms in the attic, arranged on slightly different levels.
The clients are a family returning to Milan after ten years in Denmark.
The historical atmosphere of the Naviglio Grande is enhanced by bringing the original materials back to light and then filter them within a certain Nordic sensibility.
Clear and desaturated atmospheres, make environments sufficiently enlightened by natural light, which is never particularly abundant in this kind of dense urban fabric.
The access floor is freed of any pre-existing subdivision in favor of a spacious openspace, structured by a “comb-like” scan that leaves the space near the windows free. Immediately after a small entrance hall, are compacted a wardrobe with service bathroom, the staircase and the storage room underneath. Living room is delimited by two opposite monolithic elements in natural steel: a TV shelf and a kitchen counter, above which hangs a shelf, which also has the function of supporting the hood.
The existing staircase, given the nautical proportions, is completely rebuilt. Staircase become one singole spatial element with the corridor on the upper floor. Like a true architectural promenade, in the turning point between the staircase and the corridor, a bookcase is built.
Conceived to fill an existing wall niche, the welded steel plate shelves transforms a purely distribution space into a place with its own function and specificity.
The attic floor is dedicated to the bedrooms, which are served by a second bathroom, and to a micro-room for smartworking, created where it seemed impossible to create an additional environment.
In the evolutionary context of the living geographies, this house too, as well as a place to live, is in fact a place to work.
However, within the limitation of the expensive square meters available, the home office becomes a contemporary “St. Jerome’s Study”, large enough for the ergonomic minimum.
In the belief that the homes protagonists should be the people who live in it, interior design never takes over with shapes and materials that attract excessive attention. No sophistication, preciousness or too strong color: the architecture is a background and its compositional recipe is linear and subtractive.
The materials are limited to wood, new and old, but always with a natural finish, and iron.
The new wood can be found in the knotted oak planks used for the floors and the staircase, but also in some selected furniture.
The old wood appears in some existing roof beams that have been sanded and in a portion of the ancient ceiling revealed after the removal of a false ceiling.
Then there is the insertion of waxed calamine iron elements, with its silky and warm surfaces.
The rest is simply white: from the finely stretched plaster walls to satin laminate furniture.
