🏅 Milan Design District — Golden Mention & Community’s Choice Award
International Design Competition | Terraviva Competitions | October 2025
The project received both a Golden Mention and the Community’s Choice Award in the Milan Design Districtcompetition, which invited designers to reinterpret a traditional Casa di Ringhiera apartment in the Isola District. The design proposal explored how interior architecture can bridge Milan’s historical identity with contemporary modes of living, fostering a dialogue between memory, community, and material experimentation.
A design drawn by memory, by material, by form.
A dwelling where retro textures are sharpened into contemporary clarity — where the richness of marbles, leathers, and polished woods return, yet stand reborn in precise geometries and fluid surfaces.
Here, the apartment becomes a vessel of duality.
The scalloped beam, the deep red stone, the warm grain of wood: fragments of a 20th-century Milanese palette. Yet they are not quoted nostalgically, but reframed — cut into bold planes, curved thresholds, and sculptural frames that belong to the present.
Where the pulse of Milan’s Design District flows into the home, the interior dares to cultivate a juxtaposed identity: at once rooted in tradition and projected toward the future. It does not smooth contradictions, but sharpens them — staging friction between intimacy and openness, memory and innovation, quiet retreat and urban vibrancy.
Here, design is not only built for the eye. It is lived in before its walls even rise. This is not just realism, but emotional architecture: a space that carries the resonance of retro life, embedding memories into material. It makes the viewer want to step inside the frame and remain there, to feel as much as to see.
This is not revival, but reinvention. Retro materials are wielded as contemporary tools — their weight offset by clarity of line, their nostalgia transformed into a future-facing elegance. Through them, design translates material into memory, and memory into atmosphere.
A home for the young Milanese creative, it is both retreat and stage: a place to live, to work, to host, and to reflect.
A dialogue between memory and progress.
A resonance between past and present.
Here, design becomes an atmosphere of time: tactile, precise, and alive.
A breath between retro and now.
