Finding beauty in Brutalism: a flat in Milan provides a haven for creativity

Some people buy their dream home for the location, others for the space it affords them; for Italian fashion designer Massimo Giorgetti, it was a love affair with Brutalism.

His one-bedroom Milan apartment is housed in the former L’Istituto Mobiliare Italiano residential complex in the city’s Porta Romana district. Externally untouched since it was finished in 1966, this celebrated Brutalist masterpiece came with a few caveats – namely its single-glazed windows set in iron frames, that don’t open, making it more than a little chilly in winter and a greenhouse when temperatures soar. “You have to really love this building to live in this apartment,” laughs Giorgetti, joking that he needs to wear a hat and scarf in bed during winter and still wakes up with a frozen face.

While it’s considered an icon now, the building was the subject of protests in the late 1960s for bringing down the tone of the elegant neo-classicist area. Even 15 years ago, when Giorgetti started taking appointments for his new ready-to-wear label MSGM in a studio opposite, it didn’t strike him as somewhere he would dream of living.

“I remember the first time I left the showroom and saw these weird towers,” he recalls. “I liked the London Barbican and I liked some Carlo Scarpa houses and so on, but I was not obsessed with Brutalism like I am now. Over time, I started to discover and appreciate more about it.”

After meeting his husband, Mattia, the couple started looking for a home just as the flat came on the market. “On the first visit we encountered the Pirelli lino floor, the concrete structure, the Le Corbusier-furnished entrance, its beautiful Japanese garden, and went crazy for it,” he says. After a “very fast negotiation”, they got the keys in December 2015.

Giorgetti credits his close friend, the architect Massimiliano Locatelli, for his education in architecture and Brutalism. “He has taught me a lot of things about Italian design.” So, naturally, it was Locatelli who the couple asked to handle the interior renovation. “It was the perfect project for him, with the concrete, the brick, the 60s and 70s aesthetic – he loved it.”

With the interior gutted, Locatelli convinced the couple to divide the space into framed glass boxes to mirror the balconies, and installed black parquet flooring and white walls to evoke the sense of a contemporary museum-cum-modern Milanese condo.

By May 2016, the work was complete, and the couple moved in with their two dogs, Pane and Coda (the Italian for “bread” and “tail” respectively). The interior, says Giorgetti, has been an evolution ever since. “It has been step-by-step and slow, if I’m honest,” he smiles. He points to items like his Fritz Hansen dining table and Arne Jacobson chairs as favourite furniture pieces.

“From the beginning, it’s been an open house,” he says. “I’m a life-lover and so everything I have is open and I share it – with my team, with our friends, with journalists, with press… That is not a marketing strategy. Absolutely not. I’m from Riccione in Rimini, an area where people are open and enjoy food, the wine, enjoy, enjoy life.”

As was always the plan, it’s art that has come to define the space. From the Nathalie Du Pasquier series hanging in the kitchen, to pieces by Alighiero Boetti, Carla Accardi, Robert Mapplethorpe,Larry Stanton, Roberto di Pinto and Louis Fratino in the open-plan living space, the common theme is portraiture. “If you look in every artwork, there is a face or something similar. I love faces. I like trying to understand what there is behind a face,” he says, stopping to clarify. “I’m not a collector, though, just a lover of art. I don’t buy for investment; I just love to find connections between artworks and to put them together like it could be for an exhibition”

The apartment, he says, “is perfect for this passion.”Art, like architecture, was a slow burn for the designer. “My passion for art arrived later. The more I started travelling the world for work, the more I insisted on putting time aside on each trip to visit a local gallery, and I started to love studying the life of artists,” he says.

By Giorgetti’s own admission, the space can tend to look “like a crazy galleria”, with towers of books on fashion and photography (and, increasingly, wine now that he is starting to produce it as a side-hustle to fashion). But he loves “the chaos and the creativity – that’s very similar to me and my creative process. My husband would love to have a simpler apartment, but let’s see.”

It’s not just its Brutalist features that Giorgetti loves, but the quality of life the apartment instils in him. “I think it helps me a lot as a creative, because it’s a conceptual space; it’s not the classic bourgeois Milano apartment from 1931. In this moment where everything can look too perfect or the same, to live in a house that is precious and has its weaknesses, you have to believe in it, and there’s something amazing in that and a life I like.”

As Giorgetti continues, he stops to confess something: “You know, in the last six months, we did look at other houses, and I felt kind of guilty. Yes, there are a lot of technical issues here, but I belong with this building, with the details. It’s not only about Brutalism, it’s something that helps my life, our life, and it’s beautiful.” What did he conclude? “I thought to myself, I have to continue to fight the weather!”