MMMM Apartment: A Milan Home Shaped by Heritage and Bold Contrast
MMMM Apartment is a 2023 apartment renovation in Milan, Italy, by Depaolidefranceschibaldan architects. Set within an early 20th-century building, the project preserves the flat’s bourgeois character while inserting a self-contained metal service box that recasts the entry, kitchen, and daily circulation. Across roughly 80 square meters, older rooms and sharper contemporary elements are held in deliberate tension.
About MMMM Apartment
BOX IN BOX
This refurbishment adopts a dual stylistic code for an early 20th-century apartment in Milan.
On the third floor of a post-WWI building on Viale Beatrice d’Este, the apartment has been reworked by DDBA through an unusual renovation. The residence retains a distinctly bourgeois character, marked by large French windows that look onto rows of poplars and the brightly colored façades of the residential buildings opposite, designed by Giordano Forti and Camillo Magni.
The project grows out of close collaboration with the clients, a creative couple in search of a Milanese pied-à-terre. An analog, reflective process of conversations, exchanged opinions, and intuitions shaped a long concept phase, allowing the direction of the intervention to be defined with precision and pushed toward highly personal solutions.
The renovation began in 2021 and was completed two years later. It unfolds through two opposing yet complementary architectural codes that coexist within the home and support one another.
The first code works with the building’s heritage, preserving the original partitions and reinforcing the early 20th-century atmosphere in the bedrooms and living area. The second introduces a hyper-contemporary element: an independent functional box with a satin-finish metal shell, inserted in place of the old entrance and containing the kitchen and utility functions.
Different materials, colors, and lighting sharpen the contrast between these two approaches. The result is a home defined by counterpoint and dissonance rather than uniformity.
The apartment’s approximately 80 square meters are organized into the living area, home studio, master bedroom, kitchen, and bathroom. Entry begins in a gallery with a dark, lowered vault that recalls the corridors of Villa Panza di Biumo and the architecture of Portaluppi. Running alongside the service and kitchen box, this gallery leads to the living area through a sharp and surprising change of scene, from compression to height and light.
In the living room, a small group of contemporary pieces—above all black USM modules in different configurations—sits against the vintage elegance of the existing rooms. Herringbone oak flooring and restored original fixtures, finished in white lacquer, reinforce that older character.
The Klein-blue sofa picks up the electric blue façade of the building opposite, and stainless steel bookshelves echo the metallic finish of the kitchen box. The kitchen can either open itself to the rustic dining table or close off discreetly for privacy.
The small studio is conceived as a transformable multitasking room. A fitted wall hidden behind a dark curtain conceals storage and a Murphy bed, allowing it to turn into an additional guest room when needed.
Furnishings in the master bedroom are kept spare, with a bright orange USM unit and a large canvas by artist Jaime Hayon adding focus. In the bathroom, the same degree of customization continues: wall coverings and the terrazzo vanity were made to measure, with fragments of Verde Alpi marble set into the gray base as a direct reference to period finishes.
Photography courtesy of Depaolidefranceschibaldan architects
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