Beefbar Milan: Humbert & Poyet furnished a chapel with a bibliography, not a mood board

INTERIORS · MILAN

Reading time: 7 min

Most restaurants that invoke mid-century Milan are invoking a mood. Humbert & Poyet did something harder at Beefbar Milan: they named three specific architects and built the room from them. Luigi Caccia Dominioni in the floor, Ignazio Gardella on the walls, Vico Magistretti at the tables. Two of the three founded a furniture company together in 1947, and they named it after a character in a Verdi opera.

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There is a shorthand that has become almost unavoidable in restaurant design, which is to gesture at a period and a city and hope the reader supplies the rest. Fifties Milan. Sixties Rome. The reference does a great deal of work and commits to nothing.

Beefbar Milan does not do that, and it is what makes the room worth writing about. Emil Humbert and Christophe Poyet have taken the chapel of the former Archiepiscopal Seminary, near San Babila, and furnished it with three named architects: Luigi Caccia Dominioni in the floor, Ignazio Gardella on the walls, and Vico Magistretti at the tables.

That is a bibliography rather than a mood board, and the difference between the two is the whole distance between decoration and design.

Two of the three were partners, and the company was named after an opera

Here is the fact that makes the room cohere, and it appears nowhere in the coverage.

In 1947, three Milanese architects founded a furniture company called Azucena. They were Luigi Caccia Dominioni, Ignazio Gardella and Corrado Corradi Dell’Acqua, and they set it up initially to furnish the buildings they were themselves designing, then extended it into proper collections. It produced some of the defining objects of postwar Italian design, and it was named after Azucena, the character in Verdi’s Il Trovatore.

So the floor and the wall lights in this restaurant are not two separate historical nods. They come from two men who ran a business together, in the same city, at the same moment, for the same reason: they were architects who could not buy furniture good enough for their own buildings and so made it themselves.

Vico Magistretti, whose chairs furnish the room, belongs to the same Milanese circle and the same conviction. He was an architect first, with a long career in buildings, and the objects came out of that practice rather than instead of it.

Three architects who made furniture, then, in one room. And a company named for an opera character, in a city the restaurant’s own material describes as a city of opera. That connection is not decorative. It is the actual history of how Milanese design worked, which was through architects, small workshops and a very small number of streets.

What a nave does to a restaurant

The site is the other half of the design problem, and it is a genuinely difficult one.

A chapel is a directional space. A nave is not a neutral room that happens to be long, it is a room built to move you along an axis towards a focal point, with the vaults overhead marking the rhythm of that movement. Everything about the geometry says this way, and the height says look up.

Restaurants want the opposite. They want a room you settle into, at a table, facing the person opposite you, with a comfortable ceiling above your head and something to look at that is not thirty feet up.

Humbert & Poyet’s response is to accept the axis rather than fight it, and to bring the eye down with a horizontal band. The half-height dark walnut panelling running around the room is doing that job. Wainscoting establishes a human datum in a tall space: it says the room is this high for the purposes of sitting in it, and the volume above is something else, admired rather than occupied.

That the panelling is walnut, and half height, and reads as the codes of a traditional Milanese café, is the second decision. It supplies warmth and familiarity in a space whose architecture supplies neither. A chapel is cool, pale and vertical. A Milanese café is warm, dark and horizontal. Setting one inside the other is the move that makes the room work as a restaurant rather than as a spectacle.

The open kitchen, the bar and the dining room then run together beneath the nave, unified by a single floor, which is the correct instinct: in a space with this much architectural drama overhead, breaking the plan into separate rooms would fight the volume for no gain.

The floor is the most sophisticated thing in the room

Which brings us to that floor, and it deserves more than a line.

It is terrazzo, in green, black, white and burgundy, laid in a stylised wave, and it is a tribute to Caccia Dominioni. That reference is precise rather than general: Caccia Dominioni was closely associated with patterned seminato and terrazzo floors in his Milan buildings, using them to give an interior a graphic order that furniture then sits on top of.

Consider what it achieves here. A terrazzo floor is a poured, continuous surface, so it unifies the kitchen, the bar and the dining room into one plane without a single threshold. A wave pattern then introduces movement along the axis of the nave, which is where the room already wants to move you, so the floor is reinforcing the architecture instead of arguing with it. And the four-colour palette, particularly the burgundy, ties into the upholstery and the walnut so that the floor is not a background but a participant.

A single continuous surface doing structural, graphic and chromatic work simultaneously is about as much as you can ask of a floor.

Above it sit tables in Verde Alpi marble, an Italian green with fine white veining quarried in the Aosta valley, which picks up the green in the terrazzo and keeps the palette closed. Gardella’s triptych sconces punctuate the panelling, and an eclectic hang of artworks in mixed styles and subjects gives the walls the slightly accumulated quality that a room referencing a mid-century interior needs, since nobody’s actual apartment was ever bought in one go.

The one piece that is theirs

There is a piece in the room that belongs to nobody else, and it is worth identifying because it tells you how the studio thinks.

The Asterios pendants, in bronze and frosted glass, are Humbert & Poyet’s own design. In a room otherwise assembled from named historical figures, the lighting they hang from the vaults is the one element that is contemporary and authored by them.

That is a confident piece of self-positioning. Suspended lighting in a tall space is the element with the most presence, because it occupies the middle air where nothing else can go, and it is the thing you look at when you look up. Giving that job to their own piece, surrounded by Caccia Dominioni, Gardella and Magistretti, places the studio inside the lineage rather than beside it.

Humbert & Poyet, and why Beefbar keeps calling them

Emil Humbert and Christophe Poyet work from Monaco, and their partnership has become one of the most recognisable in European hospitality design, with a manner that is warm, graphic, comfortable with colour and unembarrassed about references.

They had already delivered Beefbar Paris, and the reason the relationship has continued is visible in this room. Beefbar, founded by Riccardo Giraudi, is a group that puts the same fundamental proposition into radically different buildings across the world, which means its design partner has to be able to read a site rather than apply a formula.

A former seminary chapel in Milan and a Belle Époque room in Paris have nothing in common except that both are inherited, historic and stronger than any decorative scheme dropped into them. A studio that can answer both without repeating itself is worth keeping.

The restaurant sits at Piazza del Quadrilatero, a short walk from San Babila, which puts it inside the fashion district and within the small number of streets where most of the designers it references actually worked.

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

The easy version of this project is a striking room in an unusual building, and it is a striking room in an unusual building.

The version worth keeping is about method. Humbert & Poyet could have specified a generically mid-century Milanese interior and nobody would have complained. Instead they went and found three architects, took one thing from each, and put them in a space that already had more character than most restaurants will ever be given.

What holds it together is that the three were not strangers to each other. Two of them founded a company in 1947 and named it after a Verdi character, in a city that has always run on the traffic between opera, fashion and design. A room assembled from people who knew one another will always sit better than one assembled from a period, and that is true whether or not a single diner ever works out why.