TO STROLL THE dense grid of streets that make up Milan’s Quadrilatero della Moda shopping district is to be inundated by the Italian fashion industry: Ferraris idle outside boutiques; stylists hurry past the marble halls of the Versace showroom; tourists march in procession down narrow sidewalks.
The scene stands in vivid contrast to the district’s modest, bucolic beginnings in the 16th century, when an order of Franciscan nuns built their convent amid vegetable gardens. Named Santa Maria del Gesù, the building was repurposed in the late 1700s, but the lane where it once stood, now home to men’s wear and tailoring ateliers, was named Via Gesù in its honor.
Three years ago, when Inge Theron, the South African-born founder of the skin-care spa FaceGym, was first shown the apartment on Via Gesù — a 2,360-square-foot, top-floor flat with long, wrought-iron balconies smothered in wisteria — she was moved by the district’s ecclesiastical origins. “We’re Catholic — it’s a very important part of our family,” she says, “so coming to Italy and being on this street, it was as if someone was clearing the path for us.”
Theron, 49, had hardly expected to find a sense of religious sanctuary in Milan’s property market. At the time, she and her husband, an Italian financier, and their two young daughters Assisi, 8, and Tesse, 10, were living in London’s Holland Park neighborhood; she was merely looking for a simple pied-à-terre. For her, Milan had always been a place for business, not family. But once she entrusted the renovation of that apartment to the designer Giuseppe Porcelli, whom she knew from his interiors for London’s Arts Club — English eclecticism tinged by Italian excess, with marble-lined walls, Victorian-inspired furniture and Murano chandeliers — everything changed. Today the abode on Via Gesù is her family’s full-time residence.
When Porcelli first encountered the space, which hugs the building’s inner courtyard, it was a stripped-bare white box. “There was nothing to keep, nothing to remove. It was a blank canvas,” he says. Now the moodily lit apartment embodies both the intimate charm of a boudoir and the grandeur of a Neapolitan palazzo. Milanese style is sometimes understated and minimal, but Porcelli, 40, is from the Campania region, where Naples is, and has adopted that area’s romantic aesthetic. “I like the idea that pieces have been collected through the years,” he says. That approach was honed during the seven years he spent as the art and design director for Dimorestudio, the Milan-based architecture and design practice that has long incubated talent. “You start with those layers,” he says, “and then you finish with some fringe.”
HE BEGAN WITH the surfaces, covering the walls with blue grass cloth, laying solid oak herringbone parquet floors and creating cream-colored moldings from gypsum — a touch inspired by Milanese homes of the late 1930s, before the bombings of the Second World War that leveled much of the city. The next layer was the furniture, a mix of custom designs and vintage pieces he sourced from antiques dealers and galleries. In the living room, between the kitchen and the dining room, a large, square ottoman used as a coffee table has been upholstered with a vintage carpet, and Kutani porcelain lamps from the late 19th century are topped with shades fashioned from pale yellow Indian dupioni silk. In the center of the room, there is an overstuffed sofa upholstered in a blue, red, green and gold cotton jacquard, with a skirt of bullion trim. A faux-bamboo floor lamp designed by Ingo Maurer in 1968 is placed beside an emerald green love seat. Above the hearth hangs a Napoleon III mirror in black and gold, its curved edges subtly shaped to resemble a gendarme’s hat.
The kitchen has floor tiles from the Amalfi Coast and a custom trompe l’oeil wallpaper that mimics the pattern. Theron’s collection of contemporary Venini glass vases and 20th-century Venetian goblets is displayed on floating glass shelves above mocha-hued lacquered cabinetry. By the window, Porcelli placed a painted Empire-style wine table and a pair of brass stools typically used by cellists. The rectangular dining room — connected to the living room through a built-in, transparent bar cabinet — is lined with hand-painted wallpaper that Porcelli designed with Milan’s Pictalab in a floral motif inspired by an Impressionist painting atop a patinated gold background. The glossy mahogany Regency dining table with fluted legs is surrounded by Art Deco-style lacquered chairs with seats upholstered in burnt orange silk velvet. Porcelli found the 19th-century fireplace of gray Fior di Pesco marble in France.
When Theron had imagined the apartment as a place to have meetings and host clients, she and Porcelli planned to have a cigar lounge in an alcove just off the front entrance. After the family decided to move to Milan full time, they went ahead with it anyway. “It’s a comfortable, sexy room where you want to come and have a cigarette after dinner,” she says. The mahogany-framed walls have sections upholstered in floral fabric from the famed 19th-century Paris textile house Braquenié and a custom sofa covered in the same lush cotton. A pair of tufted Napoleon III armchairs in Braquenié damask sit atop an antique rug with a geometric patterned border. A wall panel hides a small bathroom, so “those who don’t make it home” can spend the night in the impromptu suite, Theron says.
While the residence has plenty of clever modifications that make it comfortable for entertaining, it is the private spaces with which Theron is most enamored. Beyond the dining room lie the couple’s quarters, complete with a dressing room dominated by an armoire with crosshatched brass doors. Spiritual references abound in these secluded chambers, but subtly. Above the bed — upholstered in a gold-toned floral jacquard and a moss green Lelièvre velvet and shrouded by a fringed canopy in apricot and burgundy silk — hangs a 17th-century portrait of Santa Cecilia, a Roman martyr from the third century. For their linens, instead of conventional monogrammed initials, the family chose an image of the Holy Mother in oxblood red. “It’s paying homage to the street,” says Theron, suggesting that the home is not merely divinely well designed but actually watched over by a higher power. “We feel,” she says, “as though we’ve been deeply blessed.”
The post An Elegant Milan Apartment That Invites Peaceful Contemplation appeared first on New York Times.
