Aesop Corso Magenta: Dimorestudio borrowed a room, not a period

INTERIORS · MILAN

Reading time: 9 min

A butler’s pantry is the one room in an Italian villa built to store things in bottles, decant them and wash your hands at a sink. That is also the job description of a skincare shop. Dimorestudio noticed, and the thirty-five square metres it drew on the corner of Corso Magenta have been left exactly as they were since 2016.

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Most retail interiors take a period as their reference. A decade, a palette, a set of shapes, and a mood board to hold them together.

Aesop Corso Magenta takes something more useful. Dimorestudio went to the butler’s pantry of a 1930s Italian villa, and it went there for a reason that has nothing to do with nostalgia. A pantry is the only room in a house whose entire purpose is to keep things in bottles, decant them, prepare them and wash up afterwards, behind glass, at a sink, in a space too small to waste.

Read the brief that way and everything in the shop stops being decoration and starts being the correct answer. The glossy tiles are a wipe-down surface. The linoleum curves up the wall because that is how you make a floor easy to clean. The cabinets have glass fronts because a pantry stores things you need to see without touching. The stainless steel sink in the middle of it all is not a styling flourish. It is the reason the room exists.

That is why the shop has aged the way it has. It was built on a function rather than a fashion, and functions do not date.

Thirty-five square metres on the line of the Roman wall

The address is Via Meravigli 18, on the corner where Corso Magenta runs into it at Via San Giovanni sul Muro. The store is universally known by the Corso Magenta name, and the corner is worth a moment because it is not an ordinary one.

Via San Giovanni sul Muro is named after a church that stood at the end of it, recorded in a document of 1039 as S. Joannis quae est supra murum, Saint John which is upon the wall. The wall in question was the Augustan wall of Roman Mediolanum, running between Porta Vercellina and Porta Giovia. The church came down in 1786. The street kept the name, and it still traces the line.

So the shop sits on the historic threshold of the city, at the point where the road out of the Roman gate becomes the street inside it. For an interior whose whole argument is about belonging to a neighbourhood, that is a good address to have drawn.

The immediate neighbours make the same point at closer range. Marchesi 1824, whose original pasticceria has stood around the corner on Via Santa Maria alla Porta since the year in its name, is the archetype of exactly what Dimorestudio was reaching for: a small Milanese shop that keeps beautiful things behind glass in fitted cabinetry and has never needed to be anything else. Corso Magenta is a street of bottegas, and the store is one more of them.

The unit itself is 35 square metres. Everything below happens inside that.

A pantry is a room of containers, and so is a shop

The reference Dimorestudio gave was precise. The studio described the space as a whimsical essay on the materials of the butler’s pantries of 1930s Italian villas, and as a contemporary version of the small neighbourhood bottegas still common in the area.

Both halves of that sentence are load-bearing.

The pantry supplies the mechanism. It is a service room, so its surfaces are chosen for maintenance rather than for show, and that constraint is what gives the palette its discipline. It is a room of containers, so its walls are cabinetry rather than display, and that is what allows a very small shop to hold a full range without looking stocked. And it is a room where the person serving stands at a sink with their sleeves up, which is precisely the choreography of an Aesop counter.

The bottega supplies the manners. A bottega does not advertise across its window. It shows you the goods, keeps its scale to the street, and lets the fitted joinery do the talking. Aesop’s stores are built to sit inside a block rather than announce themselves out of it, and in Milan that instinct already had a local form to borrow.

Put the two together and the design brief resolves into a single sentence: build the shop as though it had always been the pantry of the building above it.

Teal, lemon and talcum

The palette is one decision, taken once and held.

Glossy teal subway tiles run across the walls, up over the ceiling planes and around the arches, laid with matching grout so the surface reads as a single glazed skin rather than as a grid. Tiling a ceiling is the giveaway detail. Nobody tiles a ceiling for looks. You tile a ceiling in a room that gets wet and steamy, which is to say a scullery, a pantry or a bathroom, and carrying the tile overhead is what turns a shop into that room rather than a shop dressed as one.

Against the teal, the studio set colours it described as nuanced greens, creamy yellows and faded pinks, muted as though every surface had been dusted with talcum powder. In practice that means lemon-yellow corner shelving, powder pink upholstery on a pair of mid-century velvet chairs by the window, and green display cabinets whose tone sits so close to the tile that the joinery half dissolves into the wall behind it. The cabinets have rounded frames and sliding glass fronts, drawn from early twentieth century furniture, and their silver-rimmed rounded windows are the single most recognisable thing in the room.

The floor is soft grey linoleum, and it does something quietly clever. It curves gently upward where it meets the wall instead of stopping at a skirting board. That detail is called coving, it comes from hospitals, laboratories and commercial kitchens, and its purpose is to remove the corner where dirt collects. It is a hygiene detail, imported wholesale into a shop, and it is the clearest proof that the pantry idea was taken literally rather than decoratively.

Lighting is two large suspended discs, hung on brass rods, with fibreglass shades carrying an amber motif. They are the only objects in the room permitted to be purely themselves.

And in the middle, the stainless steel demonstration sink, set into the cabinetry as a utilitarian trough. Every Aesop store has a sink. This one is detailed as though it came out of a scullery, which is the point at which the concept and the retail requirement become the same object.

Aesop hands its collaborators a reading list

The reason a brief like this survives contact with a global brand is that Aesop asks for it.

The company has grown to more than two hundred standalone stores and around eighty counters, and it does not repeat a design. Marsha Meredith, its creative director during the years Corso Magenta was drawn, put the founding instinct plainly: the great thought from the beginning was to reject sameness. She also described the discipline as stripping back and keeping things as minimal as possible, and set the working rule that in each community the store should work with the fabric of the street.

Alongside that, Aesop asks the architects and designers it commissions to read before they draw. The recommended texts include Peter Zumthor, Jun’ichirō Tanizaki and Gaston Bachelard. Marianne Lardilleux, who joined from LVMH in 2016 and now leads global retail design across a team of more than forty, has described each store as the outcome of thirty years of research, worked out down to the height of a sink and the choice of a chair.

Bachelard is the one that matters here, and it is worth knowing why. The Poetics of Space, published in 1958, is a philosophy of the intimate interior, and it devotes an entire chapter to drawers, chests and wardrobes: the argument that containers hold imagination as well as objects, and that the small enclosed spaces of a house are where its emotional life is stored.

Give that book to a studio and ask for a shop, and a room made of cabinets is a very direct answer. The reading is now formal enough that it has reached the literature: a 2025 paper by Ji Eun Kim and Eun Soo Park in the journal Space and Culture analyses Aesop’s signature stores explicitly through Bachelard’s poetics, arguing that spaces built to feel like refuges create the kind of attachment that stays in the memory.

Corso Magenta is thirty-five square metres of enclosed, glazed, cabinet-lined refuge. It is, quite literally, a Bachelardian room.

Paris first, and then Milan

Corso Magenta is the second of a pair.

Dimorestudio designed Aesop Saint-Sulpice in Paris, which opened in 2014: a bronze, marble and velvet room with a chequerboard floor, a brass vanity carrying three basins set against pink velvet, vintage mirrors and a spiral stair. It is unmistakably the same studio and it is unmistakably a different country.

The studio was explicit about why. For Paris, it said, the inspiration was a classical French taste; for Milan, it looked for a local and distinctive trait.

That is the whole method in one sentence, and it explains a distinction worth holding on to. Both stores are period-literate, but neither is a period reproduction. Saint-Sulpice takes the register of the older boutiques and private apartments of its own quarter. Corso Magenta takes the register of the Milanese service room and the neighbourhood shop. Same studio, same client, two cities, and the reference changes because the street changes.

Salci came from Cappellini, and the room shows it

Dimorestudio was founded in Milan in 2003 by Britt Moran and Emiliano Salci. Moran was born in North Carolina and trained as a graphic designer. Salci was born in Arezzo and was an art director at Cappellini before the studio began.

That second detail explains a great deal about how this shop is composed. An art director at a furniture house spends their working life deciding how objects sit together in a photograph: the interval between pieces, the colour that makes a shape read, the one wrong element that makes a group look intentional. Corso Magenta is arranged exactly that way. The two velvet chairs, the pair of lighting discs, the corner shelf, the cabinet run and the sink are placed as a composition rather than as a plan.

Salci has described the studio’s method as taking a historical approach to give a project roots, then injecting it with a more contemporary feel. The studio calls itself a group of storytellers and experience builders. On the evidence of thirty-five square metres in Milan, both descriptions hold.

Ten years on, the room is still the room

Retail interiors are commonly specified around a refit cycle of five to seven years. Corso Magenta opened in 2016 and remains as drawn, still trading, still listed by Aesop under the Corso Magenta name.

By 2021, visiting design writers were already noting during Milan Design Week that the shop looked as good as it had on opening. It has now passed ten years without a change, which is a rare thing for any commercial interior and an unusually clear verdict on how it was conceived.

The reason sits in the first paragraph of this piece. A room designed around a look has to be redrawn when the look moves. A room designed around a function only has to keep doing the function. Bottles, glass, water, a sink and a small dry space to keep things in: that brief has not altered since 1930, and it will not alter next season either.

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Final thoughts

There is a version of this shop that would have been easy to make and hard to keep. Choose the 1930s, buy the right chairs, pick a colour nobody else is using, photograph it beautifully and enjoy four good years.

Dimorestudio did something harder and quieter. It found the one room in the Italian house that already did the job Aesop needed doing, and it built that room instead. The tiles go over the ceiling because pantries steam. The floor curves up the wall because pantries get scrubbed. The cabinets are glazed because pantries store. The sink is a trough because that is what a sink in a service room looks like.

Thirty-five square metres, on a corner that has been a threshold since the Romans, opposite a pasticceria that has kept its own cabinets polished since 1824. Ten years in, nothing about it needs revisiting, which is the most that can be asked of an interior and the least that is usually achieved.