Renovation and furniture design for a space in a late XIX century building
Milan (IT)
2023

In one of the oldest streets of Milan and in a late 19th-century building, there are spaces that likely once housed stables for animals and then spaces for artisans and commerce.

In this continuous shift of functions, the space remains and is constantly reworked and rearranged. The space remains, with its columns made of coarse agglomerate, the arches of handmade bricks, the large iron-framed windows, and the floor, only partially preserved in original terracotta.

The project has its limitation in the possibility of intervening solely with a furniture setup, which therefore becomes new scenes that organize the space and accommodate the new function.

More than a thousand types of wine from various regions of Italy and the world are displayed on four shelves, transforming the winery into a library of wines. The shelves follow the existing arches and create new ones to accommodate a large mirror that increases the depth of the space, niches for tables and the passage to the service area: it is a game of doubles, a multiplication of views, adding thickness to the walls maintaining, however, a light essence, respectful of the existing. They simultaneously reveal the marked geometry, the looming mass, the dialogue between different materials.

The structure of the shelves experiments with different ways of displaying wine, through a three-dimensional geometric grid made of iron rods, capable of holding wine bottles in a specific balance and shelves of various sizes: the exposed welds and the raw materials bring back the vibrant materiality of the place, straightforward in its own way, but sophisticated.
As in a Sol Lewitt artwork, the seriality of the grid and its incompleteness reflect on the concept of space and time, expanding and densifying, thus influencing the very structure of the place, through the black lines and their doubles projected on the walls with shadows: they perhaps tell of the product and the impossibility of a complete, albeit vast, collection.

Credits
Type/Program: Winery renovation
Client: Private commission
Location: Milan (IT)
Year: 2023
Status: Built
Collaborators: Vera Bondarenko, Weixi Yan
Photographies: Daniele Iodice/QTA