The brief
The client — a single professional in her early forties who works in publishing — bought this 1960s flat near the Alzaia Naviglio Grande specifically because of its proportions. The rooms were genuinely generous for the size; they just needed to be reoriented around a different way of living. The existing layout had a formal dining room that was never used and a kitchen that was essentially a corridor. She wanted the opposite: somewhere to cook properly, space to have four people for dinner without a lot of fuss, a bedroom that felt like a refuge rather than a storage room.
Layout changes
The wall between the kitchen and the dining room came down. We replaced it with a walnut island that serves as both a working surface and an informal dining table — it seats four comfortably, six at a push. The kitchen itself was rebuilt around a six-burner professional-grade range with a custom steel hood. The cabinetry is solid walnut with flush-fit handles; we commissioned it from a small workshop in Brianza that we've worked with since 2021.
The bedroom lost its built-in wardrobes, which were consuming almost two metres of the longest wall and made the room feel half its actual size. We replaced them with a dressing room carved from what had been an underused second bathroom — a spatial reorganisation that gave the bedroom back its proportions and gave the client a wardrobe that actually works. The main bathroom was rebuilt in Tivoli travertine: floors, walls, and a custom-cut basin. The quarry contact is a family yard near the Tivoli villa that holds our preferred cut of Roman travertine — lighter and more consistent than the standard export grade.
Walls and light
The previous owner had painted everything white, which sounds neutral but in practice bleached out the warm afternoon light that comes through the south-facing windows. We worked through about twelve samples before settling on a lime-based plaster finish in a warm off-white — the kind of colour that has no name in a paint chart but is obviously right in the space. The process takes longer than paint; the plasterer we use applies three coats with a steel trowel and the final surface has a depth that reflects light differently depending on the time of day.
In the bedroom we used a pigmented lime wash in a tone that reads as almost terracotta in low morning light and closer to sand by afternoon. This wasn't in the original brief — it came out of a conversation mid-project when the client said she was tired of living in rooms that looked the same at 8 a.m. and 6 p.m.
What it cost to get right
The travertine bathroom ran long. Custom stone work in Milan has a reliable lead time of about four months from commission to installation, and we built that into the schedule — but the basin took two additional weeks because the first cut revealed a vein pattern we didn't like. We had it recut. This kind of decision is part of the service: we don't pass forward a material we wouldn't live with ourselves. The delay pushed the project completion by three weeks and cost around €1,200 extra in labour. The client agreed it was the right call when she saw the result.