Get Inside In A Porta Nuova Apartment Designed By Luca Cipelletti

The Porta Nuova apartment is the latest residential project of the architect Luca Cipelletti and has architectural precision and material opulence for an art collector.

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Discover The Porta Nuova Apartment By Luca Cipelletti

In the latest residential project of the architect Luca Cipelletti, it’s impossible not to notice two other names on the door, the designers Nathalie Du Pasquier and George Snowden– who were members of the 1980s radical design movement, the Memphis Group. When Cipelletti first set foot in the Porta Nuova building’s windowless, L-shaped attic space, which he’d had been hired t redo, the door was labelled with the names of the movement’s founding father, Ettore Sottsass, and cofounder Marco Zanini.

This project was thought out and carried out with every detail, for example, the table surfaces are cut at 45-degree angles to give a paper-thin appearance; Marble is combined on floors and walls to look like a large hem. And a linear motif, like the frets of a guitar, runs horizontally across the apartment from ceiling to walls, across shelves and across the floor with almost painful precision.

Originally, the house had high, sloping ceilings with no natural light, and to make this house more livable, Lucas Cipelletti made a series of incisions in the front, sides and ceiling to create windows and skylights and added about 100 square meters of terrace.

His client, an art collector, brought an impressive collection of photography but little else, leaving Cipelletti to curate a mix of blue chip art and furniture that complemented the gravity of both the architecture and the photos. The living room, overlooking the front terrace, features a White and Black sofa, a cocktail table, two sculptures by Alessandro Mendini and an Ettore Sottsass lamp.

The dining table is carved from 3.5 meters of solid fossilized oak topped by a bubblegum pink vase by Carlo Scarpa and surrounded by chairs by Gio Ponti. Lucas Cipelletti scoured galleries, auctions and stores to find prized 20th-century treasures like a Franco Albini rocking chair, Gio Ponte desk and dining chairs, and a gorgeous bubblegum pink vase by Carlo Scarpa. Some of the pieces nod to the house’s radical Italian roots, such as two totemic sculptures by Alessandro Mendini and a set of ten Sottsass glass Vistosi vases, snagged altogether at auction.

So that the place wouldn’t be too stuck in the 20th century, the architect selected some contemporary gems for the mix – a work of art-lighting in the kitchen by Argentine artist Tomás Saraceno, another by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor in the dining room, and several of its own super-minimal furniture, like its paper-thin concrete shelves and a dining table carved from twelve feet of solid fossilized oak.

In the master bedroom, a pair of 18th-century marquetry cabinets by Giovanni Battista Moroni nod to the rich history of Italian furniture making – a predecessor to so many other Italian greats, dotted around the house.

Lucas Cipelletti worked with Pace Gallery and the artist’s studio to commission the work by James Turrell, which works in the master bedroom as a pseudo headboard and emits light and color in a one-hour loop. The chest of drawers, one of a pair, is an 18th-century masterpiece of marquetry by Giovanni Battista Maroni, and the set of armchairs and benches by the window is by Giuseppe Pagano.