Casa REdDUO
Casa REdDUO turns a generous Milan, Italy apartment into an expressive home-studio for the creative duo behind REdDUO. Set between Porta Venezia and Città Studi inside a 1930s building, the apartment becomes both domestic interior and working laboratory for their material-driven practice. Here, domestic rituals, studio life, and collaborative craftsmanship intersect in rooms that balance Old Milan character with a contemporary, experimental edge.
Light falls across marble and terrazzo at the entrance, catching new textures where old flooring meets a reworked surface. High ceilings, softened corners, and a precise metal line draw the eye through a sequence that feels at once domestic and quietly theatrical.
Within this 1930s apartment in Milan, REdDUO reshapes an Old Milan shell into a combined home and studio with a strong focus on colors, materials, and custom furnishings. The project sets out to make daily life and work coexist, using crafted elements, tactile finishes, and distinct room identities as its primary tools. Every room reads as a chapter in an interior palette study, tuned to the rhythms of both living and making.
Reworking Old Surfaces
At the threshold, the original Italian marble flooring meets terrazzo that folds the past into the present. Portions of the old stone are removed, crushed, and reintroduced into cement, so the new surface literally carries fragments of the previous one. This move sets the tone for the apartment’s material thinking: nothing feels purely new or purely historic, but layered, edited, and re-read.
Throughout the home, REdDUO preserves existing floors wherever possible, allowing their patina to remain legible under fresh interventions. The result is a continuous ground that records the building’s evolution while supporting different atmospheres from room to room. Underfoot, each step recalls an earlier plan even as the current layout supports contemporary routines.
Drawing A Line In The Air
A defining move happens not on the floor but at the ceiling. High proportions become a canvas for a chrome metal strip that tracks the perimeter like a single line. Sharp corners are eased away, so the transition between rooms feels fluid rather than abrupt.
Above that metal edge, the ceiling keeps a rawer, more textured finish, while below it, the walls stay delicate yet tactile. This deliberate split sets up a dialogue between rough and smooth, classicism and modernity. One continuous datum quietly unites the apartment, guiding the eye even as colors and finishes shift.
Rooms With Singular Palettes
Each room carries its own color story, making movement through the apartment read like a sequence of vivid interior scenes. The video room and library lean into cucumber green, giving the place of relaxation and research a cool, saturated calm. Nearby, the guest room takes on an acid butter note that feels warmer and more playful.
The walk-in closet turns to tobacco tones, deepening the sense of enclosure and privacy. Across these rooms, wall finishes, fabrics, and rugs pick up and stretch each hue, so color becomes both background and active presence. Custom-made furnishings sit alongside vintage pieces and original elements such as the fireplace, establishing a dialogue between tailored volumes and inherited details.
Home-Studio As Daily Landscape
Domestic interiors and workrooms stay distinct yet intertwined. The main apartment hosts everyday life, from bedrooms shaped for privacy and comfort to shared rooms that hold books, video, and conversation. Furnishings are almost entirely bespoke, conceived as unique pieces that reinforce how personal the home feels.
Beyond a hidden internal passage, an adapted former service area becomes the studio. This connection runs through a bar “box,” a recurring REdDUO element that adds a sense of stagecraft to crossing between living and working zones. Once beyond it, the studio reads as a dynamic place for making, yet still tied to the history of the apartment.
Material Contrasts In The Studio
In the studio, historical traces are held in tension with more radical surfaces. The bathroom, set at the center like a hinge between work areas, concentrates this duality. Raw concrete walls come together around a triangular glass opening that cuts light into the room.
Against that concrete, the original banana yellow color and vintage cement tiles hold their ground, producing a vivid contrast. Old and new do not blend; they press against each other and stay legible. Throughout the studio, preserved flooring and updated elements work in concert, so the workday unfolds across layers of time.
Crafted Collaborations
Textiles, lighting, rugs, and objects arrive through an extended network of collaborators, turning the apartment into a live catalogue of artisanal production. Custom rugs, carpets, and upholstery sit alongside carefully chosen lighting and kitchen components, each tuned to the specific room palette it supports. Bathroom ceramics, taps, and electrical fittings are selected with similar care, reinforcing the project’s tactile ambitions.
Cabinetry and furniture are crafted by a single woodworking partner, giving the custom pieces a shared language of making even as forms vary. Artworks and custom speakers introduce yet another layer, this time visual and acoustic, so walls and corners hold more than color and storage. The home-studio functions as an evolving testbed where pieces conceived with partners move from idea to daily use.
By day, light works its way across marble fragments, chrome lines, and textured walls, sharpening some surfaces while softening others. In the evening, lamps and concealed glow gather these materials into quieter compositions. Casa REdDUO stays in motion, but its material palette and furnishings give that motion a clear, crafted frame.
Photography by Giulio Ghirardi
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