bachelors of design The dimore studio founders break the design rules in their new home
Filled with pieces by design luminaries, a gritty Milan apartment is the newest home of the Dimore Studio cofounders
Milanese design partnership dimore studio has made a name out of creating stories for its clients to live, shop or work in.
It’s a relief, then, to discover that when dimore studio’s cofounders emiliano salci and Britt Moran make a home for themselves, they’re firmly in first-person mode. Part diary, part autobiography, the pair’s new Milanese apartment is the least obviously ‘designed’ of their interiors to date, despite the fact that nothing is out of place. The paradox is explained by two musings emiliano lets drop as he and Britt show me around. The first: ‘a house isn’t just walls and tables, it’s also things like the glasses you choose and the placing of a cushion – you can’t go down to that level of detail with clients.’ The second: ‘We like houses that are “wrong”.’ Put the two together to unveil the secret of Mr and Mr dimore’s new home: obsessively controlled dissonance.
not a couple, Britt and emiliano are friends and professional partners who also happen to live together. They first met in the late 1990s and an immediate creative and personal rapport was forged that would lead to the founding of dimore studio in 2003.
This is the pair’s second shared home in Milan; before that they lived either side of a landing in Via solferino, which is now the dimore studio office, and dimore gallery, a space dedicated to highly curated shows such as the repertorio exhibition devoted to osvaldo Borsani, the founder of Tecno.
a favourite of Britt and emiliano, osvaldo takes centre stage in the dining room of this latest flat in Viale Jenner, where a set of chairs he designed break up the room’s insistent horizontals with the jaunty diagonals of their ‘corseted’ wooden backs. other designers whose work
Emiliano has a knack of finding hues that spar intriguingly with one another within each space
appears in the new apartment range from 20th-century furniture luminaries such as gio Ponti, carlo Mollino and charlotte Perriand to designers’ designers such as carlo de carli and Ignazio gardella.
But although emiliano jokes about ‘carting around pieces from house to house’, the process of bedding down old design friends in a new home is far from casual. The mid-1950s pendant lamps by gardella that illuminate the corridor of the duo’s new abode also featured in their previous Via Mozart home. There, set above a plain ebony console and a monochrome constructivist painting, these spherical lanterns seemed coolly Modernist; here, placed in the apartment’s long corridor with its elegant great-aunt vibe, they appear utterly art deco.
In Milan’s far northern suburbs, the Viale Jenner area has long been associated with immigrants and the working class. But in the 1930s, this was still a semi-rural neighbourhood and whoever designed the palazzo and its interiors certainly played the ‘my flat is my castle’ card.
Though the apartment had been neglected, most of the floors, fittings and ceilings were intact: ‘the great thing,’ says emiliano, ‘is that it had never been made over’. only the floor of the kitchen and one bathroom needed replacing; for the rest, the dimore duo set about doing what, in emiliano’s words, they like best, even with external commissions: ‘having a little history to work with’.
Perhaps their boldest insert is the dressing room, its lacquered, coral-brown central island shining like a slick of wet mud between two rows of mirrored floorto-ceiling wardrobes. emiliano, who does the chromatics, has a knack of finding hues that spar intriguingly with one another within each space, because they neither match nor jar. often, they’re also colours that defy naming – ‘moss green’ misses the organza glow of the shade on the walls of emiliano’s own bedroom, while the blue of Britt’s room across the corridor is part baby boy, part duck egg, but mostly something else entirely.
‘retro’ doesn’t begin to describe the style of a duo who are able to fashion their own private epoch out of the echoes of so many others. Dimore Studio dimorestudio.eu