Milano Contract District, a strategic hub mixing together Design and Real Estate, has already proudly created numerous designated areas for the Lombardy capital in less than one year from its own launching.
Penthouse One-11 stands out among the latest: a luxury two-level penthouse of over 300 sq.m. with views of the cityscape and of the park, set into the housing estate designed by Zaha Adid in the Milan CityLife. The apartment, upscaled by some eye-catching Dilmos furniture, holds up the label of “Sensory apartment”, giving voice to the “Psychology of dwelling”. TecMa Solutions devised this specific concept to establish an innovative system for house designing, particularly aimed at people’s well-being.
The architects from the involved project division took this work as a challenge from the very start, tied up by technological, typological, distributive and timely restraints – two months only to get the project done –. Still, the tailored strategy developed by the team made it possible to create an architectural output in line with modern market’s expectations. Its concept lays on the principle of a seamless space between walls and furniture, the floors and its coverings, transparent and blind partitions, mobile and fixed separation systems, furniture’s finishes and countertops’ surfaces.
The splayed doorway, a sort of breach leading into the apartment, gets characterized by different materials like Rex’s magnum oversize Statuario slabs on the floor, heat-treated oak on the wall of the technical compartment, Lualdi’s Wall&Door boxroom and a Fontanot’s grey glass slab framed with raw iron.
A visual connection with the socializing spaces gets immediately established: on one side an opening cut sections the living room’s wall and thickens it, while on the other side we find a large wall with concrete grey finishes – machine-smoothed with Oikos lime –. This latter wall has just two openings and gets washed out over its entire length by an unbroken light beam (Flos’s Monn Line) leading your gaze until the kitchen’s door. The long hall linking together the doorway with the kitchen is the architectural cornerstone of the whole space, as it connects the living area with the bedrooms and the doorway with the utility area.
As we enter the kitchen, the pavement changes: the same Rex’s Statuario used for the doorway spreads now vertically in a “continuous vein” pattern over the walls, covering even the adjacent laundry room. Using the Statuario results in a choice that hints at well-balanced luxury by which determine, with precision, the contact point between modern and tradition.
The long curtain wall separating the living area from the bedrooms breaks in just two points, with the first leading into an access/dressing room for a guest bathroom and the double room, introduced through very slight openings flush against the wall – Wall&Doors Lualdi’s opaque lacquer –. The double room set limits for a consistent space, arranged over three separate environments interrelated by full-height sliding openings – Lualdi’s glossy lacquered Drive –. These three compartments are the dressing room, the double room and the bathroom, this last one equipped with both a free-standing Cono di Gessi bathtub and a Stilla-CTC shower cabin.
In this context, the interplay between surfaces, materials and light generate the place’s own identity: the Natural Genius oak floor by Listone Giordano spreads over the walls bordering the bed and the bathtub, stretching out the volume. Magnum oversize formats made with Florim’s grès ceramic – Industrial Steel – enclose the shower, providing it with a quite plastic feature. The opaque and grainy surfaces of Biamax paintings by Oikos produce sophisticated colour effects. The heat-treated oak and opaque lacquered textures of Lema’s furniture – Naica and Text – mark off the equipped walls. Mirrors’ reflections and glasses’ transparencies – Torsellini Vetro – enhance perceptive senses. Lis’s light sources purposefully fit the architecture giving shape at the same time to functional and evocative contexts.
Except for the doorway and the kitchen, what set the floors apart is a single wooden finishing made with oak and dove-grey coloured. The choice of Slide Natural Genius by Listone Giordano as a unifying surface for the whole living space originates from the purpose of turning the classic parquet into a system of pavement furniture with wide ascents over the vertical walls.
The penthouse can be accessed through an open-line staircase set in the living room: Fontanot’s redefinition of the actual vertical connection falls rightfully within the most qualifying interventions of the entire work. As you step on the top floor, the external view gets emphasized by a large terrace which can be accessed through a space breaking the double-height volume of the living room. This latter is equipped with a minimal kitchen – One 80 by Ernestomeda – hiding inside a partition wall that, through Lema’s sliding panels, leads into the main room of this floor.
Searching for different surfaces with a common rigid aesthetic is the leitmotif of this project, where wood, raw iron, Corian, stoneware and glass naturally mix together.
