Inside Fornasetti’s New Milan Flagship, Trompe L’Oeil Becomes the Architecture

Tutto Bene has redesigned Fornasetti’s Milan flagship across three floors, treating the house’s flat, two-dimensional motifs as if they were load-bearing rather than applied. The same idea, mining the same eighty-year-old drawing, resurfaced days later in an entirely separate collaboration on the other side of the city.

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Introduction

Fornasetti reopened its Milan flagship at Via Senato 2, on the corner with Corso Venezia, during Milan Design Week 2026, with a press preview on 20 April and public hours from 20 to 26 April, 10:00 to 19:30. The redesign, a full interior overhaul of the 270 square metre space plus a new entrance on Via Senato, was led by Felizia Berchtold and Oskar Kohnen of the Milan and London studio Tutto Bene, working under the artistic direction of Barnaba Fornasetti. Stainless steel wall panels, screen printed with oversized drawings from the house’s own vase catalogue, line the ground floor alongside trompe l’oeil painted walls, burl wood panelling and green marble, a palette that stays close to Fornasetti’s own black, white and gold, with the objects themselves left to carry the colour.

Three floors now do three distinct jobs: a threshold at street level, an archive above it, and a lived-in apartment at the top. What runs underneath all three, and through a second Fornasetti project launched the same week in a different part of the city, is a single idea. The house’s flat, printed imagery, the vases, the faces, the zodiac signs, is being treated as structural material rather than as something applied to a surface afterwards.

A store built from Fornasetti’s own drawings, at architectural scale

Kohnen has described the studio’s starting point as archival rather than blank-page: “Our first instinct was to go into the archive. We were especially interested in Fornasetti’s historic collaborations and total interiors.” That shows most plainly on the ground floor, where an oversized vase drawing, the kind of image that would normally sit printed on a single ceramic surface, has been screen printed across a full run of stainless steel panels, and a hand-drawn zodiac forms the walls of a dedicated Zodiac Room. The same graphic vocabulary that has decorated individual objects since 1940 is here doing the work a column or a partition would normally do.

Berchtold has framed the result as a deliberate friction, describing a “tension between the artistic and the industrial, the historic and the almost futuristic.” Kohnen has put the studio’s own role in similar terms: “As designers, we see our role as both custodians and interpreters: honouring the density and authorship of the archive while ensuring it remains alive, curious and experimental.” Trompe l’oeil, a technique Piero Fornasetti used across furniture and interiors from the outset, is deployed here at wall scale rather than object scale, which is a different design problem: a painted illusion has to hold up as someone walks past it, not just as someone looks at it from a fixed point in front of a cabinet.

Berchtold and Kohnen work between London and Milan, and the Fornasetti flagship joins a portfolio built largely from spaces that already had a strong existing identity to answer to rather than a blank site. Nightingale, a Mayfair restaurant, drew on European Kaffeehaus culture; the interior for the Swiss department store Globus in Basel worked inside an existing retail institution; Cubitts’ eyewear stores in London’s Marylebone and New York’s West Village both had to fit a recognisable brand language into two very different cities; and a Milan apartment the studio designed as a pied-à-terre was significant enough to reach the cover of AD Germany. The consistent thread across that range is a studio more interested in interpreting an existing story than in starting from nothing, which is exactly the brief Fornasetti’s own archive presented.

A threshold, an archive, and an apartment

The ground floor, Fornasetti Space, works as a concierge point and an entrance sequence, and for Design Week it also hosts Fornasetti Fiori by Fjura, a floral residency from the Australian creative Simone Gooch. The first floor, the Living Archive, presents the brand’s catalogue in museum-style vitrines and custom cabinetry, ceramics, trays and decorative objects arranged as a collected body of work. The top floor, the Apartment, is the most domestic of the three: four rooms, each built around a Fornasetti theme, architecture, metaphysics, identity and astronomy, furnished so that the objects sit inside a lived-in setting rather than the vitrines one floor below.

The sequence has a logic to it. A visitor moves from a public, transactional space at street level, through a curated version of the archive on the first floor, to something closer to how the objects might actually be lived with on the floor above. Fornasetti has always sold the idea that its pieces belong in a home rather than in a showroom, and the building now makes that argument architecturally, floor by floor, rather than leaving it to a catalogue photograph.

The same 1958 screen turns up twice in one week

Piero Fornasetti made a thirty-two panel folding screen in 1958 called La Stanza Metafisica, the Metaphysical Room, built from trompe l’oeil perspective drawings that play with depth and illusion rather than depicting a single fixed view. It is one of his most collected large-scale works. During the same week the flagship reopened, the rug house cc-tapis launched a Fornasetti collaboration at Piazza Santo Stefano 10, titled (META)FISICA, curated by Dan Thawley with exhibition design by Pablo Molezún and a sound composition by Carlos Casas, presenting handknotted wool and silk rugs that reinterpret archival Fornasetti motifs as dreamlike, dimensional compositions. Barnaba Fornasetti has described the pieces in terms that echo his father’s original screen directly: “These are not merely rugs, but landscapes where I love to walk or sit.”

The name is not a coincidence, and the connection between the two 2026 launches has not been drawn anywhere the two are usually covered separately, one as a retail story and one as a design-fair exhibition. A sixty-eight-year-old work about walking into a flat drawing and finding it has depth is now the reference point for a flagship store treating printed imagery as architecture, and for a rug collection treating a floor as a piece of dimensional illusion you can stand on. Two different collaborators, in two different buildings, arrived at the same source in the same seven days, which says more about how deliberately Barnaba Fornasetti is mining a specific piece of his father’s work in 2026 than either project says on its own.

Cc-tapis itself began in France and moved its headquarters to Milan in 2011, founded by Nelcya Chamszadeh and Fabrizio Cantoni after more than twenty years producing handknotted rugs in Nepal. The company now works with around 400 artisans across ateliers in Nepal, Thailand and India, and its Milan studio, led by art director Daniele Lora, has produced more than 18,000 rugs sold through 240 points of sale in 65 countries. That scale is worth setting against Fornasetti’s own numbers: a house with more than 13,000 individual works in its own catalogue commissioned a collection from a company with comparable production numbers of its own, which is part of why a single rug in the resulting collection can carry as much handwork as a piece of furniture.

Piero Fornasetti’s own archive, and why there is this much of it to mine

Piero Fornasetti founded the house in Milan in 1940 and went on to produce more than 13,000 individual works across design, decoration, painting and printing before his death in 1988, working in limited series rather than one-off pieces. His most consequential professional relationship was with the architect Gio Ponti, who encouraged him to bring decorated, everyday objects into ordinary homes rather than treating decoration as a separate fine art. Their collaboration intensified through the 1940s and produced several complete interiors during the 1950s, including the Sanremo Casino in 1950, Casa Lucano in 1951, and the interiors of the ocean liner Andrea Doria in 1952. Ponti later wrote that a chapter of his own life story would have to be titled “Passion for Fornasetti.”

The house’s most recognisable single motif, the stylised face of the nineteenth-century opera singer Lina Cavalieri, began in 1952 as a series called Tema e Variazioni and eventually ran to more than 400 versions, each reworked with different expressions, headwear and framing, across porcelain, furniture and accessories. That habit of variation on a fixed theme is effectively the design principle behind the 2026 flagship too: the same drawings, reworked at a different scale and in a different material, rather than a new set of images invented for the store. Barnaba Fornasetti, who took over the atelier after his father’s death, has kept the Tema e Variazioni series in continuous production, which is part of why Tutto Bene had a thirteen-thousand-work archive to draw from rather than a fixed, closed catalogue.

Fornasetti Fiori, a temporary layer over a permanent redesign

Fornasetti Fiori by Fjura runs on the ground floor through 30 June 2026, a twelve-week residency by the Australian floral artist Simone Gooch, who builds sculptural compositions from seasonal and unusual blooms directly among the vase imagery and furnishings. The residency is explicitly temporary, unlike the architectural redesign around it, and it changes daily rather than being installed once and left. Placing a living, perishable material inside a space built from painted and printed illusions of flowers and objects is its own kind of contrast: the vases screen printed onto the steel panels do not change, and the flowers in front of them do.

What launched alongside the reopening

The reopening also introduced new pieces into the collection rather than only rehanging old ones. A hand-decorated porcelain vase collection includes designs named Architettura, Casa con Colonne, Civette and Farfalle, continuing the house’s practice of naming pieces for their motif rather than for a season or a collection number. A new bar cabinet, Palladiana e Arlecchini, carries hand-painted trompe l’oeil framing, the same technique used at wall scale downstairs now applied back to a single piece of furniture, alongside new sideboards, consoles and curved cabinets. The cc-tapis rugs, handknotted in wool and silk on vertical looms, sit alongside these as the collection’s first major textile collaboration built specifically around the Stanza Metafisica reference rather than around the house’s more familiar face and vase motifs.

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Final thoughts

Three floors, a temporary flower shop, a new porcelain collection and a separate rug launch across town would be a lot of activity to cover as five unrelated pieces of news. Read together, they are one idea carried out at five different scales: a drawing that was flat in 1958 is now a wall, a floor, a bar cabinet and a vase, all in the same design week, all under the same son’s direction. That is a more coherent statement about what an eighty-six-year-old archive is for than any single floor of the building manages on its own.