Six studios, one catalogue: L’Appartamento by Artemest at Palazzo Donizetti

ART & CULTURE · MILAN

Reading time: 10 min

Six studios from Melbourne, Riyadh, New York, Los Angeles and London were each given a room in a Milanese palazzo and one rule: everything in it had to come from Italian artisans. The interesting part is not the rooms. It is that the makers stay the same every year and the designers never do.

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L’Appartamento by Artemest ran at Palazzo Donizetti, Via Gaetano Donizetti 48, during Milan Design Week from 7 to 13 April 2025, with a press preview on the seventh and public opening from the eighth. It was the third edition and Artemest’s tenth anniversary year.

The format is simple to describe. Six international interior design studios each take a room in a historic Milanese building. They may specify anything they like, provided every piece comes from Artemest, the Milan marketplace for Italian artisan design. In 2025 the six rooms drew on work by more than 180 Italian artisans, brands and artists.

That single constraint is what separates this from every other show house, and it is worth stating plainly before the rooms.

At the Kips Bay Decorator Show House, which has run in New York since 1973, designers specify whatever they want. At WOW!house, which began at the Design Centre Chelsea Harbour in 2022, they work with a set of partner brands. At L’Appartamento the catalogue is defined by nationality rather than by commerce. A designer from Riyadh or Melbourne has to build a room out of Italian hands, or not build one at all.

Which makes the exercise less like a show house and more like a brief.

The makers are the constant, and the designers are the variable

Here is the fact that reframes the whole thing, and it takes four editions to see.

No studio has ever appeared twice.

Across 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026, twenty-three studio commissions have gone to twenty-three different studios. The first edition drew on Dubai, Dublin, Miami, Paris and Houston. The second on Kuwait City, London, Dubai and New York. The third on Melbourne, Riyadh, New York, Los Angeles and London. The fourth, in April 2026, on New York and Chicago.

The one thing that does not change is the roster of makers. Fornace Mian, Bottega Veneziana, Fratelli Tosi, Carpanelli, Laura Meroni, Zanaboni and Ghidini 1961 recur edition after edition.

So the show is not really a showcase of designers. It is the same question asked once a year with a new set of eyes: can Italian artisan production absorb a completely foreign sensibility and still be recognisably itself? The catalogue is the constant. The designer is the variable. Four years in, the answer has been yes four times, in four quite different accents.

The six rooms

The Foyer, by Simone Haag of Melbourne, took the entrance sequence of frescoes, marble mosaic floors and decorative balconies and treated it as a threshold between eras. Marble, brass, glass, lacquered wood and Murano, with makers including Fornasetti, Ghidini 1961, altreforme, Laura Meroni, Donghi and Draga & Aurel. The room’s anchor is the Cleo chandelier in green glass by Bottega Veneziana, chosen because it could hold a conversation with both the period plasterwork and the contemporary furniture underneath it. A suspended floral installation stood in for drapery. Haag describes leaning into contrast and “introducing whimsy and curiosity”.

The Reading Room and Studio, by Nebras Aljoaib of Saudi Arabia, is the most instructive room in the house. Given a study, she declined to put a desk at the centre of it. The seating went in the middle instead, and the room became conversational. Marble, leather, wood, brass and hand-blown glass, with Zanaboni, Minotti Collezioni, Arcahorn and Ceramiche Ceccarelli, a sculptural chaise longue as the spine, and a bespoke Sling Chair she designed for Artemest, with marble arms carrying a flowing leather sling. A single teal chandelier does all the contemporary work. Her own line on it: “I wanted the room to feel composed rather than decorated.”

The Grand Salon, by Meyer Davis of New York, was the only room given a title of its own, La Sirena. Will Meyer and Gray Davis worked the siren myth through Calacatta Violet and white Carrara marble, bronze, brass, glass, resin and gold, with pink and burgundy velvet. The makers include Fratelli Boffi, Carpanelli, Galleria Romanelli, Corsi Design Factory and l’Opificio. The plan is the point: four separate seating clusters rather than one arrangement, so that a visitor has to move through the room to find it.

The Dining Room, by Romanek Design Studio of Los Angeles, is the warmest. Brigette Romanek worked creams, pinks, greens, yellows and golds under soaring ceilings and original parquet, with Laboratorio Paravicini, Matlight Milano, Casa Bugatti and Aina Kari. Two custom Michelle chandeliers by Bottega Veneziana hang over the table, and the table itself is the piece Romanek names as her favourite: L’Armando, a travertine dining table split in two down the middle, with rounded corners and wide legs. “I love when designers think differently, and the split in the table’s middle is so original,” she has said. She also gives the clearest statement of the whole enterprise: “The artisan’s hand is everything in design. It’s where intention, skill, and heart come together.”

The Entertainment Room, by 1508 London, led by Ailsa Connery, took the smallest room and made it denser rather than lighter. The studio built fifteen distinct vignettes into it, hung heavy Rubelli drapes to enclose the space, and worked in ruby glass, malachite, brass, onyx and marble, with Brionvega, Fornace Mian, Carpet Edition and Griffe Montenapoleone. Two pieces stand out: the Portici travertine bookcase by Sissy Daniele, and Cleopatra, an artwork assembled from more than 4,000 tile pieces. The stated idea was a nineteenth century salon, “a space for creative liberty and discussion of art”.

The Bedroom, by Champalimaud Design of New York, was treated as a suite with a vanity area and a terrace, and pitched at the glamour of 1960s Italian cinema. Terracotta, sunset tones, deep green, ivory and gold. Venetian mirrors by Fratelli Tosi, an ivory majolica cylindrical chandelier, cloudlike sofas and a green lacquer desk on the terrace. The wallcovering is Nature Whisper by Fabscarte, hand-painted with citrus trees. And the object everyone photographed: a sculptural ostrich concealing a lacquered bar.

A seventh space, the Lounge, was curated by Artemest itself as a deliberate pause between the designed rooms, in powdery blues, deep greens and intense reds, with Visionnaire, Baleri Italia, Ceramica Gatti 1928 and Il Pezzo Mancante. The exit was marked by a Porsche 911 Carrera 3.2 filled with pink blossom.

Three answers to the same problem

Read the rooms against each other and a shared design problem emerges that nobody set as a brief.

The palazzo is more ornamented than anything you can put in it. Frescoed ceilings, gilded mouldings, arched niches, a monumental elliptical staircase with wrought-iron railings running through three floors. Any furniture placed underneath that is going to be the second most interesting thing in the room.

Three studios solved it three different ways.

Aljoaib deferred. She removed the piece of furniture the room’s name demanded, pulled the seating to the centre, and let the gilding be the decoration. Her word, “composed”, is exact: she arranged rather than embellished.

Meyer Davis dispersed. A single seating group under a frescoed ceiling in a room that size becomes a stage set, so they broke it into four and made the visitor travel.

1508 London enclosed. Instead of yielding to the volume, they shrank it with heavy drapery and filled it with fifteen closely worked vignettes, so the eye never has to look up.

Defer, disperse, enclose. Three legitimate answers to the question of what you do when the ceiling is better than anything you can hang beneath it, in one building, in one week.

The building has a day job

Palazzo Donizetti is usually described as a nineteenth century palazzo with frescoes and a grand staircase, which is true and considerably undersells it.

The building mixes Renaissance, Baroque and Liberty elements, with a Baroque-leaning façade and a Liberty staircase. It was built as a private residence.

It is also, the rest of the year, a working fashion headquarters. The palazzo was acquired by the AEFFE Group in 1994 and restored, and it now holds the representative offices, showrooms and communications department of Alberta Ferretti, along with workspace for Philosophy di Lorenzo Serafini, Pollini and other AEFFE brands.

The restoration is credited to Studio Associato Caccia, Dominioni & Zucca, working with the architect Dubini.

Stack those three facts and the building becomes the best argument in the show. A nineteenth century private house, restored under a practice carrying the name of one of the defining figures of Milanese postwar design, occupied by a listed fashion group, and dressed for one week each April by a marketplace built to keep Italian workshops in business. Four eras of the same city’s creative economy, in one address, and the rooms are only the newest layer.

What the whole exercise is for

Artemest was founded in 2015 by Marco Credendino, who is chief executive, and Ippolita Rostagno, its creative director. The platform now carries work by more than a thousand Italian artisans across some 50,000 products, alongside a contract arm for trade projects and the Artemest Galleria, a 5,000 square foot space at 518 West 19th Street in West Chelsea, New York. Its Milan Design Week programme began smaller: in 2018, the platform’s first showcase in the city was Stranger Pinks, a single-colour exhibition for around forty-five brands at TED Milano, a private villa in the Sempione district, several years before the format grew into L’Appartamento.

Rostagno grew up in the Tuscan hills near Florence, the daughter of a decorative painter and a director of experimental theatre, and studied sculpture at the Istituto d’Arte in Florence, where she first watched local artisans work. She moved to the United States in 1982 and founded a jewellery brand in New York in 1999.

The company began with something she noticed on her visits home. “Every time I went back, there were fewer and fewer artisans, to the point there were none,” she has said. The early work was literal: “going around Italy on trains looking for all the little artisans in nooks and crannies.”

And the aim, in her own formulation, is not really retail at all.

“The mission is to make these artisans busy enough so that they hire young people and the knowledge is transferred.”

That sentence is the reason L’Appartamento is worth taking seriously as design rather than as merchandising. A show house normally exists to sell a look. This one exists to put work through a hundred and eighty workshops, and then to prove, publicly and in a room, that those workshops can make something a designer in Melbourne or Riyadh actually wants.

Each room is a demonstration that the answer is yes. Which is a more useful thing for a fair week to establish than a mood.

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

Milan in April produces a great many rooms that exist to be photographed once.

This one is doing something more specific, and the clue is in who does not come back.

Twenty-three commissions, twenty-three studios, no repeats. A designer gets one year, one room and one catalogue, and then the catalogue meets somebody new. Fornace Mian and Bottega Veneziana and Fratelli Tosi have now made work for Dublin, Dubai, Kuwait City, Houston, Melbourne, Riyadh, Los Angeles, London, New York and Chicago, without any of it ceasing to look like what it is.

That is a serious claim about the range of a national craft economy, and it is being made in furniture rather than in a report.

The split travertine table, the marble-armed sling chair, the chandelier that has to talk to a fresco. Each one is a small piece of evidence that a workshop in Italy can answer a question posed in another language.

Ippolita Rostagno wants those workshops busy enough to hire the next generation. Six rooms a year is a modest way of arranging that, and a very persuasive one.