In Milan, a Maximalist Home With a Shower Shaped Like a Bird Cage
With a hand-rolled cigarette pinched between his fingers, the architect and designer Roberto Gerosa, 71, is rushing around his house, a cavernous former lumber workshop in Milan’s residential Villapizzone district, pointing out his favorite objects. In the corner that serves as his office, he presents a 13-foot-tall gilded column that was once part of a 19th-century theater set.Against a nearby wall is a wooden bookcase heaving with bolts of vivid fabrics: glossy heirloom brocades, pinstriped cottons and his most recent acquisition, from a tour of markets in Provence, a 19th-century paisley cashmere shawl that he plans to repurpose for a client’s upholstered headboard.In the guest bathroom is a birdcage-shaped metal shower stall of his own design painted Yves Klein blue and crowned with a bouquet of ostrich feathers.
Gerosa moved into the 2,100-square-foot space, which has a basement studio of the same size, in 2020, in search of a place where he could both live and work. “But I didn’t want to make a typical architect’s loft,” he says. “That’s not my style.” Instead, he’s created a warm, irreverent home and atelier that speaks to a lifetime of collecting and curating forgotten objects. The layout of the single-story building — which is open save for the guest suite at the back and the primary bedroom at the front — allows Gerosa to keep his various passions at his fingertips. In the span of a few moments, he might arrange flowers in the kitchen, pull reference books off the shelves in the office, then disappear into the workshop, where he resuscitates vintage furniture.
Gerosa made the kitchen island from a wooden door he found when he moved into the building. Above it hangs a brass pendant lamp of his own design.Credit…Francesco Dolfo
Over the past several decades, Gerosa has earned a reputation reimagining homes for members of Milan’s bohemian aristocracy. He is often called in once a drafty Venetian palazzo or opulent city pied-à-terre has been tidily renovated and needs an injection of elegance and patina. “When I enter a room, I can see it transform,” says Gerosa. The finished spaces are dramatic and whimsical, filled with custom furniture, abundant greenery and patterned vintage textiles from his vast collection. In a stately apartment in Milan, he hung lace curtains along the walls, topping them with antique framed etchings and festooning the windows with gold-colored taffeta. He left a villa in Sicily mostly spare and whitewashed but accented the foyer with an antique pommel horse and sculptures of donkeys made from woven jute. “I have nothing against modernity,” he says. “It just doesn’t belong to me or my taste.”
