210 CLUBHOUSE

The design firm Studiopepe makes a scene with Unseen. This exclusive haunt beckons those in the know with a decor both refined and dramatic. A spot where cocktails are performance art and rooms glow under neon lights. Plop down on a ’ 70s design classic and groove to the music

The address is secret, and you only get in if you can show an indecipherable tattoo printed on an invitation that only arrives at the last moment. Everybody’s looking for the most talked-about destination of the most recent Fuorisalone (the fringe events of Milan’s DesignWeek) but nobody knows where it is. ‘Club Unseen’ is the 2018 style manifesto of Arianna Lelli Mami and Chiara Di Pinto, the two creative directors of Studiopepe. It follows on from their pop-up apartment in Brera last year, and once again their project is associated with hospitality, although this time the idea that stimulated their imagination was that of an exclusive club inspired by the underground scene of the 1970s. «The clubbing theme is one of this year’s hottest trends. Evidently people feel a need for lightness…» they joke. Club Unseen only opens in the evening and can host about 80 people («as a refuge from the oversubscribed events of the DesignWeek»). It’s barely visible at all from outside. «We screened off all of the street entrances. Maybe as a provocation» they say «because during Design Week everything else is visible and shared, whereas our intention was to offer an experience that would be outside the box». As the venue for their behind (semi) closed doors operation, they found a late 19th-century warehouse behind Piazza del Tricolore, hidden among the high-class residential buildings in the historic part of Milan. «We enjoy colonising places the public don’t know about and that haven’t already been compromised by other design people». The spaces had been left inviolate for over 30 years, and still had timber ceilings and unplastered walls: signs of their time that Chiara and Arianna have intentionally not overwritten, and in fact have emphasised with audacious combinations, using neon lights to make graphical signs, wallpapers with three-dimensional textures, plastic curtains that look as if they have been lacquered, and geometric patterns made from ceramic. Their inspiration –they explain – comes from the radical architecture of Archizoom and the sets of Stanley Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange. But there are none of the excesses of the ‘Korova Milk Bar’ variety. The interior is surprisingly well lit, an effect that’s amplified by a rarefied palate of powdery and milky tones, interrupted here and there by a few touches of brighter colour, such as the Klein blue they’ve used to emphasise the large portals which split up the club into seven rooms, in an interior project that gets its life from apparently antithetical realities: historical memory and the contemporary, shiny and matte surfaces, and materials that are both precious and poor «but are strongly iconic, like the ribbed glass and tiles, which we’ve ennobled by applying high-quality working processes to them». Along the route, visitors come into contact with historic design pieces by Luigi Caccia Dominioni, Angelo Mangiarotti, Charlotte Perriand, Franco Albini, and Gerrit Rietveld, which share the scene with other items designed by Studiopepe themselves: «Club Unseen is proof of our ability to do product design as well as other kinds. We’ve matured enough to do that now». Visitors can lose themselves among the ceramics, mirrors, wall hangings, neon chandeliers, onyx tables,