Paper Moon Giardino: the Milan room AB Concept designed to be looked past

Interiors · Milan

Reading time: 9 min

There are twenty painted ceilings in this building, finished around 1830 and conserved by somebody else the year before the restaurant arrived. AB Concept’s entire contribution was to light them from below and then design a room quiet enough to lose. It is the least assertive thing the studio has ever built, and one of the most confident.

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Paper Moon Giardino opened in April 2018, timed to Milan Design Week, at Via Bagutta 12 in the Quadrilatero della Moda. The interiors are by AB Concept, the Hong Kong practice founded in 1999 by Ed Ng and Terence Ngan, and the building is Palazzo Reina, completed in 1830 to a design by the architect Nicola Dordoni for the noble Milanese Reina family.

Ng’s first reaction on seeing it is on the record and is exactly right: “This is stunning, even too stunning for a restaurant!”

That sentence contains the whole problem and, as it turns out, the whole solution. What follows is a scheme built almost entirely on restraint, and it is worth setting out carefully, because in the same year the studio delivered three intensely narrated rooms inside Hong Kong’s former Central Police Station at Tai Kwun. Milan is the opposite instinct, from the same two people, in the same twelve months.

The ceilings, and who actually saved them

Start with what was already there, because it is the reason the restaurant looks the way it does.

Palazzo Reina holds twenty painted ceilings, contemporary with the building, so around 1830. They are painted a secco in lime colours, not true fresco, and they combine ornamental compositions with grisaille, set with medallions carrying the effigies of poets and mythological subjects in the full neoclassical language of the period. No individual artist is recorded. The Italian architectural record attributes them to craftsmen most likely trained at the Scuola di Ornato at Brera, founded by Giocondo Albertolli, who worked alongside Giuseppe Piermarini. The walls carried faux-marble finishes to match.

The building is protected. The whole complex sits under vincolo by ministerial decree of August 1944, under what is now Article 10 of the Italian heritage code, and the garden and its tempietto are separately protected by a regional decree of 6 May 2010.

And here is the fact that reframes the project. The ceilings were not conserved by AB Concept. They were restored between 2014 and 2017, in a building-wide project run for the landlord by p+p Studio under the architect Ermanno Previdi, with restoration works by Aurora Restauri and the interior painted finishes by the conservator Marco Catenazzi. The twenty ceilings were cleaned of atmospheric particulate, consolidated with velinature, their fissures filled with lime-based mortars and their losses retouched in mineral colours. The work completed in February 2017 and the building was inaugurated that year.

So AB Concept walked into a shell that had just been given back its best feature, twelve months earlier, by another team entirely. What they decided to do with it was point at it.

Concealed light, and a palette designed to lose

The single move that organises the whole restaurant is concealed lighting that washes the ceilings from below, drawing the eye up into the building’s original character rather than down to the new floor level. Italian coverage adds the detail that the geometric patterning of the decorated ceilings informed the lighting layout, so the light is not merely aimed at the paintings but set out according to them.

Everything underneath is then calibrated not to compete. The palette runs to dove grey walls, light greys with a distinctive green, creams and browns. In the Grand Salone, the colours are taken directly from the mural overhead, so the room is a paler, flatter version of its own ceiling. In the Wine Library, the same: the scheme is drawn from the painting above it.

That is a genuinely unusual decision for a studio of this standing, and it is worth naming plainly. AB Concept designed a room to be looked past. Not an empty room, and not a shy one, but one whose colour, contrast and detail are all set a notch below the thing above them. In a building where the historic asset is overhead rather than at eye level, that is the correct answer, and it takes real discipline to leave the walls alone.

There is no separately credited lighting designer. The uplighting is the studio’s own, and the decorative fittings throughout are Lasvit, using FLUX, the hand-blown lead crystal collection Ed Ng and Terence Ngan designed for the Czech glassmaker and launched at Euroluce in Milan the year before. Each FLUX bowl is shaped individually around a timber mould, so no two are the same, and its reference is light falling on shallow water and the marks a tide leaves behind. Specifying your own product into your own project is a neat piece of vertical integration, and here it does a specific job: hand-blown crystal is the one material in the room allowed to catch light as brightly as the ceiling.

Five rooms, arranged like a house

The plan is domestic on purpose. The client brief, in Ng’s words, was “a cosy space that feels like a private residence”, and Italian trade coverage describes the sequence as moving through rooms proprio come in una casa, exactly as in a house.

You come in to the bar, which is small, with a square counter and a few stools. It is finished in grey, with a high-gloss black stone bar carrying an inset tree with oval leaves, and there is a vertical garden here planted with the herbs used in the cocktails and the kitchen, by the historic Milanese nursery Galbiati Garden.

From there the rooms open in sequence. The Parlour works in light natural tones across a spectrum of woods, with dark teal velvet upholstery, high-gloss table surfaces and terrazzo flooring. The Grand Salone takes creams and browns from its ceiling, with black-framed mirror panels set into the corners and a full-length upholstered wall panel, framed and backlit, which shifts as the daylight does. The Wine Library is the warmest, with orange and yellow dining chair upholstery, wine displayed in large glass cabinets across three walls, and eight circular mirrors overlapping six photographs chosen for their green tones. Then the garden, the giardino of the name, the rear garden with its protected tempietto, open in the warmer months.

Capacity is ninety inside, twenty four in a covered veranda and forty outside, so a hundred and fifty four in total, in roughly five hundred square metres plus garden.

The seating is bespoke. AB Concept designed a collection of bar stools, dining chairs and lounge chairs with Promemoria, the Italian maker, alongside two of Promemoria’s own catalogue pieces, the Sofia dining chair and the Topazia outdoor armchair.

Why there are so many mirrors

The mirrors are everywhere in this scheme, and the reason is the best line anyone gave about the project.

Ed Ng, speaking to the Italian trade press: “Siamo a Milano, nel cuore del quadrilatero della moda, tutti vogliono vedere ed essere visti.” We are in Milan, in the heart of the fashion quadrilateral, and everybody wants to see and be seen.

That is a designer describing a piece of social engineering rather than a decorative effect, and it is why the mirrors are placed where they are: in the corners of the Grand Salone, catching movement; overlapping the photographs in the Wine Library; across the bar. They are doing two jobs at once. They put the room’s occupants into each other’s sightlines, which is what a restaurant in this particular quarter is for, and they move daylight around, which is what lets the same rooms carry lunch and dinner without changing character. The studio’s own description of them is functional: they help direct light across the rooms and adapt those rooms to different moods.

Two Paper Moons, a few doors apart

The context makes the deference make sense.

The original Paper Moon opened at Via Bagutta 1 in 1977, founded by Pio Galligani and his wife Enrica Del Rosso, and became one of the defining rooms of Milano da bere, the canteen of the fashion district through the 1980s and a fixture of every fashion week after. It ran for forty three years and closed in September 2020. Giardino, opened two years earlier a few doors up the same street by the family’s next generation, Claudio Bertoni and Stefania Galligani, now carries the name.

It was conceived as the fortieth anniversary project, and the brand describes the two as distinct in personality while complementing one another. The clients’ account of choosing AB Concept is unusually generous and worth having in full: “We had the opportunity to work with Ed and Terence on a project in Portugal as part of our brand’s international expansion and we clicked instantly. We loved their design concepts and approach. As a result, when such an incredible space became available in Milan, we turned to them, certain that they would have fallen in love with the old mansion as much as we did.”

They were right about that. Ng’s brief to himself, in his own words, was “a true testament and homage to the former mansion”, and homage is exactly the register.

The same studio, the opposite instinct

Set this beside AB Concept’s other 2018 work and the range is striking.

At Tai Kwun in Hong Kong, in the same year, the studio put three restaurants across one floor of a 1919 police headquarters and gave each one a fully argued identity: a jade-walled Chinese dining room, a British one, and a bar built out of police badges, uniform blue and an armoury. That project is authorship. Every surface is saying something.

Milan is the reverse. There is no cultural thesis, no narrative device, no motif. There is a ceiling from 1830 that somebody else has just spent three years repairing, and a studio that decided the most useful thing it could do was turn the lights up on it and stay out of the way.

Five years later the studio would take the Paper Moon name into Raffles London at The OWO, the Grade II star listed Edwardian Baroque building on Whitehall completed in 1906, and do something different again: olive trees, terracotta, travertine and a wall of film stars, an Italian house performed inside an English government building. That version won three awards in 2024. The Milan room has won none, and has never been written about at length by anyone.

Which is, if you think about it, precisely what it was designed to do.

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

The instinct in a building like this is to answer it. To match the ambition of an 1830 ceiling with something equally emphatic below, so that the new work can be seen to have happened.

AB Concept did the opposite, and the discipline required is considerable. Every colour in Paper Moon Giardino is a notch quieter than the one above it. The only material allowed to compete is hand-blown crystal, and it is doing so at ceiling height. The mirrors are there to move light and to let people look at each other. The furniture is Italian, bespoke and unassertive. The room is a background.

That is a hard thing for a studio with three awards on its Hong Kong work in the same period to do, and it is why this is the AB Concept project most worth arguing about. The best compliment available is that almost nobody has written about it. Under that ceiling, that is close to the point.