Located in the heart of Milan's Navigli district, and once the warehouse of an astrophysics professor approaching retirement, Studio Paradisiartificiali transformed the 37-square-meter space into a studio that reflects the new owner's vested interest in philosophy and metaphysics.
In collaboration with artist Owen Gent, this small apartment surrenders itself to otherworldly murals and a curated landscape of bright furniture and decor punctuating the white box. It's proof that studio apartments can take on a far-from-ordinary and distinctly transportive aesthetic.
The client's prompt — a space for people who will spend a few days in Milan — felt simple. But to say the result is anything close to elementary would be a shameful understatement.
"We found this idea of Mysterious Baths being a shelter for travellers passing through fascinating," say Lorenzo and Alessandro, the force behind Studio Paradisiartificiali. "It made us think of the home less as a place of belonging and more as a place of passage and encounter; something brief and unexpected, but still capable of leaving a trace."
And Milan felt like the perfect city for it. "Behind its ordered, rational appearance, there is a more secret and imaginative side that does not reveal itself straight away," Lorenzo continues.
Even the best hotels in Milan weave in a sense of escapism that will make you yearn for a return to the storied city. And the designers recount how this apartment serves as a portal to that canon event of rediscovering the pleasure of getting lost and making unexpected discoveries.
"With Mysterious Baths, we wanted to give form not simply to a space, but to this particular way of looking at the world," says Lorenzo. "To remain open to surprise and to recognize that what we discover may belong as much to our imagination as to the place itself. Perhaps this was the deepest inspiration behind the project. The idea that every discovery begins with an encounter."
Even a momentary glance through the project will make you do a double-take at the arched murals that pull you into a surrealist pocket of what feels like a snapshot of an arid dream-state. Lorenzo and Alessandro explain that this spotlight-stealing moment was born from a long-standing fascination with artist Owen Gent. Particularly, his ability to create images that seem to contain a story without ever revealing it completely.
"When we realized that Mysterious Baths was developing a metaphysical character, Owen immediately came to mind," Alessandro explains. "We wanted to develop the space and the wall mural together, allowing each to influence and transform the other."
"While looking for ways to give future guests a sense of our cultural identity, Giorgio de Chirico, founder of the metaphysical art movement, became an important reference," he adds. "We were drawn to his ability to turn familiar elements of Italian life into archetypes of an imagined landscape."
In fact, the project takes its name from one of his recurring themes, I Bagni Misteriosi (The Mysterious Baths). "De Chirico explored this subject over many years through paintings, drawings, and lithographs, and later in the famous sculptural work created in Milan in 1973," shares Lorenzo.
Just imagine what a sultry Euro summer afternoon might feel like, lazing in between visions of the never-ending staircase and the painted oasis swathed by golden sands. It would be something of a deeply introspective, revealing experience. But it's not just these almost Dalí-esque murals that tell a story...
It's no secret that color plays a vital role in this white-walled studio. However, there is a story within its curation that might not feel outrightly clear at first.
"The challenge was to gradually transform the fresco painted on the wall into a domestic landscape, while preserving the project’s metaphorical dimension and the ability of ordinary things to be transfigured," say Lorenzo and Alessandro.
"The midday light filtering through the two large skylights bathes the interior in a radiant Mediterranean palette of saturated, vibrant colors. A staircase becomes a pyramid, a round window a sun, the sofas become bushes, and ultimately, the entire apartment reveals itself as a small inhabitable landscape."
Studio Paradisiartificiali's foremost lesson for us to take away from this home is to tap into architectural freedom. Rather than play to the surface-level restraints of your space, they recommend leaning into playfulism and framing your own perspective of what a home's aesthetic should look like.
"We love the idea that a very small space can create a sense of vastness, making its actual size almost irrelevant," they say. In this case, size doesn't really matter. The open layout finds its own invisible thresholds, and the loft bed is tucked away from the fun for a true moment of respite.
When asked about the trickiest hurdle in designing Mysterious Baths, they clarified that a small project does not necessarily require a small amount of work. "When the idea is ambitious, the opposite can be true," they said.
"Mysterious Baths required an amount of energy that was probably out of proportion to its size. But sometimes the need to express something becomes more important than purely practical considerations."
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It's not just metaphysicality that can set your home's vibe apart. Take a tour of this candy-colored London home, where comparatively subdued yet playful design takes over.
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