Santoni’s home in Milano occupies the entire first floor of an elegant building located behind the Botanical Garden of Milan. The layout divides the apartment into a more public and representative area and two private areas for the couple and the children’s life, totaling 400 square meters. The family request was to design a residence not only for a family and private domestic life but also as a space for new public and private relationships, a sort of new agora. It is in the more public and representative area that Urquiola’s intervention is focused. She retains the layout typical of the 19th-century noble house, characterized by the succession of salons facing the main street. She revisits the monumental quality of the Milanese bourgeois home from the 1920s through bold use of marble, proposing a new idea of abstract modernity. Natural light becomes a crucial element in the perception of the space, with its continuous and daring chromatic variations.4o mini
