Milan minimal

Architectural Review, The, Oct, 2000

Paring form and materiality down to its monastically rigorous bare bones, this new apartment in Milan is a sensuous synthesis of big spaces and ethereal light.

This new 300 sq m apartment by Claudia Silvestrin is on the top floor of an early twentieth-century block on Milan's most stylish shopping street. Silvestrin stripped the space back to the shell, keeping only the internal wall as columns. In characteristic fashion, he has unified the volumes, paving the floor throughout with delicately pale Mediterranean stone.

A 14m wall of frosted glass runs north-west down the centre of the apartment, separating day from night zones and diffusing east and west light. The main bedroom and bathroom and housekeeper's quarters are on the west side, and there is a small guest room and study on the north-east. This leaves the grand space of the living room running almost the length of the apartment on the east side.

Furnishings are monumental and austere. A bench, a single slab of stone, lines one wall of the living room which is otherwise furnished by Silvestrin's minimalist table. Panels of satin glass divide the bedroom from the bathroom where the architect's familiar hollowed stone basin stands on another floating slab and a slender curving spout constitutes the showerhead. Throughout, in habitual fashion, Silvestrin allows soft light, diffused through white fabric stretched over the grand windows, to enhance the beauty of adamantine surfaces.

Architect

Claudio Silvestrin Architect, London

Project architects

Claudio Silvestrin, Ben Collins, Giuliana Salmaso

Bathroom basin, shower, and benches

Claudio Silvestrin

Photography

James Morris