Inside an Architect Couple’s Small Family Home, Milan 41sqm/441sqft

We were a couple looking for a house. I got the telephone call from the bank and they said, the mortgage has been accepted so you can come and sign. I said, OK. And you, watching me, said, you are pregnant. I said, yes. When we realized that this place was meant to be for three and not two, you have a lot of stuff, a lot of things to think about. As a designer, it was a challenge, a beautiful challenge. We would like to have this kind of fluidity and openness, also for our baby to pass through the space. Hi, I'm Elenia. And I'm Andrea. We both are architects. And we are living here with our son, Aris. Our apartment is 41 square meters. We are in the north side of Milan, in the Martesana River area. It's green, it's open. It's like living in the countryside now. We always say it would be nice to live here. It's not so common to find a place like this near the center of the city. We are really well connected. We discovered a place which was small and dark and whatever, but when we arrived here, the first thing we said, no, it's incredible. It's the openness, the park and this feeling of nature instead of cars. This is the entrance, a small place, but we try to keep it as a proper entrance. This is the existing wall and it's one of the few things that remains from the old layout of the house. All the Wi-Fi and internet connection, electricity stuff are here. The keys here, everything is thrown in this drawer. Shoes here, they are the ones we use in the season. And then we have a place in the room where we hide the shoes for the rest of the year. And then, of course, all the jacket and little stuff we need to storage here. Inside, furniture lighting is useful. Also during the night, if we need something in the wardrobe, without switching on all the proper lighting. You know, the last thing you do before leaving, you check out and then you go. There are two paperworks of Toppi, which was an artist. This is our guardian, we like to say that. And the other one is the guardian of our son. There is a little window on top of the door, in every door in the building for the cross ventilation. It was a strong light coming in at night. We didn't want to close it, definitely, so we hide. The living room is just next to the entrance. This furniture is also used by a side table for the sofa, which comes from my partner of the office, Cesare. When he left to go to Edinburgh, we changed the color and we're still using it. We can change the position of this element. It's a perfect bed for one person. So sometimes it happens that we have some guests, my mother, his mother, taking care of the baby, so he can stay here. But of course, sharing the concept of the house, it's an open room. We decided also to put a tree there. The reason of the will is because of the light, we need to turn a bit to give him the possibility to grow in all directions. We brought some playfulness. We painted in yellow the rising sun from the east side of the house. We put these two shelves there to have books and Polaroids and stuff, but also to hide the air conditioning, which is something that we use only in summer, a couple of weeks or more. So it's easy to use the panel of the same sorts as Alpi wood. It's nice because we don't see this technical object inside. This video is sponsored by BambooLab. What if one stool could serve three parts of your home? Here's how we made it happen with the BambooLab A2L and Make a World. For the entrance, we printed this handy shoe horn that attaches directly to the stool leg. We also repurposed a headphone holder into a clamp-on umbrella hook. And for a bit of fun, this cute key holder. For the coffee table, we found a remote holder for our Apple TV, an AirPods charger, and even a baby stool for our stool. At the bedside, we used the A2L's larger print plate to make a custom lamp, along with a phone and watch charger to keep all our stuff organized. Finally, we swapped to the cutterhead to make custom vinyl stickers to personalize the stool. With tools like the BambooLab A2L and Make a World, making thoughtful improvements around your home suddenly feels a lot more possible. Curious what else you could make? Check the link in the description. Now, everywhere, toys or parties around and around and around, which is good. He really loves to play in this area, that are the most articulated with steps and wine bottles. But we are trying to educate him what to do and what not, in a way. Also, this mirror, he really likes to play with all the mirrors in the house. But of course, for us, also, it's a way to control him in some way, because from the kitchen, I can see this area. I made this bookshelf when I was in university for my room. We painted in a different color that is a bit matching with the floor and all the colors we have in this room. All the elements can be moved to maintain also the stability of this bookshelf. We have all the magazines and some books. Of course, our radio station that we switch on every morning. My notebook, I think, is from the beginning of the university, in general, like 2001. Sketching is something daily, really, in our work life. It's something playful. We sketch with Alice. We are stepping on an original floor. You can see it in the entrance of the house, downstairs on the ground floor. The date of the building is 58, 59, I think. It's real marbles in these concrete tiles. Very typical and very cheap at the time, but now it's not so cheap. Demolishing everything and redoing everything, tabula rasa, we avoid tabula rasa. It loses the taste of the house. If there are some pieces that are proper of the building, of the house, you cannot find in another house. And maybe, with all the new furniture and intervention, you will realize how to make it good-looking for you. This is probably one of the most important things that lead us to buy the apartment. The balcony here, we stay here outside in the morning having a coffee or in the sunset. It's very beautiful. The relation with the running waters and the park is fantastic. When the sun is getting very hot, on the three sides we have these shutters. We can sit here. It's not so hot during summer. A lot of people want the kitchen to be closed and hidden. For us, no. The kitchen, most of the time, is messy and whatever, but it's not a matter for us. It's good to have a lot of space to work and cook and put stuff. We can do it in the natural light. Being also with the people, if I'm here and Ilenia and Aris are playing there, we are together, but we have a functional space. The original kitchen was very tiny, like 1.20 meters, with a wall here and a wall here. On the other window, there was a 1.20-centimeter bathroom, so there were two spaces divided. We worked also on the depth of this wall in order to have more space for the cabinet. The feeling of staying still, that you really can bring things without fear of ruining a beautiful marble or something else. We use it, we use it and we use it. If there are scratches, it's part of the nature of the material. We play anyway with materials like these marbles. We cut from an old broken table. Inside, we have all the stuff that is needed for a kitchen. It's like a drawer and drawer. It's very useful instead of opening and going until the bottom to find a plate. It's very easy to use. And actually, we discovered that with the baby, it's more difficult for him to open and smash everything, so it's fine. At the beginning, we used this sink, like a bath for Aris, with a proper stool. This part we used also as a storage with all the proper things to change him. And this is like the place where we used to change him. Here, we gained one module that we used, that in the beginning was the fridge, and we put the fridge on the side. That is also storage for all the cleaning stuff. Also, all the blinds here are automatic. We took away the original shutters that were in bad conditions. When you have a baby in your arm and you cannot open the shutters, in this way, yes, you just push a button. Choosing and deciding things as a designer for your own place, it's easier in a way. But when both of you are designers, it makes more of an internal fight sometimes to find the right balance. But it was a kind of fluid process because, of course, we are with the same purpose, same thinking about natural light, about how to maintain the floor. It's our first home together, so it was really exciting. We are still designing things and still arguing about how to develop the home. Stepping from the kitchen to the bedroom, we had a wall. And it was a pity because this is the west side and we have a very beautiful light when the sun sets. And probably in those hours we are here working with the kitchen, we are here cooking, playing again with the same material as we did in the entrance of the bathroom. We played with these two screens. If we are here during the evening and our son sleeps there, because we sleep in the same room, we can close it, we can have the privacy and we can have this. But, of course, when you open, lights and mood change completely. So you have openness, you have the feeling of the four windows. Entering the bedroom, we see the wardrobe. This wardrobe is divided in three parts. These are mine and Andrea's. And then there is this one for Aris. The sliding panels become a huge mirror. It's useful as a mirror can be and also enlarge the space of the room. This is the new size bed of Aris. It's growing fast, more than expected. It's cool because we can move it around and probably one day we will pull him on the other room in order to have more privacy for him and for us. We are just fine now having this area to sleep together. When we bring Aris to sleep, we just pass through and we say goodbye to the sun, which is setting, so it's time to go to sleep, and we close up everything. Here is the only upper storage above the head of the bed, so it's not annoying, this under-leveling. The air-conditioning, we really love hiding it. This is a kind of portrait of… A family portrait, because this eye is my eye. This is me when I was pregnant, and this is Aris before coming to the world. We worked with these full-height panels that actually hide doors, so you enter a bathroom from this panel that doesn't look like a door, because we want to emphasize the height of the ceilings and the lightness that it brings inside. This panel is actual wood, the structure, but the finishing is a pattern designed by Ettore Sozzas for Alpewood, and it's from the 70s. The bathroom is quite small, of course, because we compress the space as much as possible. It's a proper laundry, so you have here washer, dryer and all the stuff, and a system for heating the water. It's a built-in sink together with the shower. We bought a concrete sink, and then we built around a little slab to sustain it, and then brakes, and then waterproofing, and then putting the resin. A drawer here, which you can imagine is full of things that are needed in a bathroom. The electricity system. We tried with this horizontal mirror to emphasize and to enlarge the size of the bathroom. In this final part, we have the bidet and the VC. When we discovered that we were waiting a baby, we designed this shower as a bathtub. It's not that big, but you can fill it up in the water until like 40 centimeters, so it's maybe for an adult not that much, but it's a proper bathtub for a baby. And this is the window that allows the steam going out when we use the shower. Even during the day, this allows to bring natural light inside from west and from south. Sometimes people say, ah, you now have a son, so you will have to change the place as soon as possible. And we are like, no, why? I mean, we are not in a rush. The quality of space is the most important thing, so for now, this is the best we did. But then, see you in the next two years, maybe there will be another baby or another dog, I don't know. So we need to find how to manage the space and feel comfortable for everybody there. There is room for changing and optimizing the space again. There is a family here with the same size apartment and they are in six. So they are living there, so I think... We can manage for a while being three or four. We are inspired by them. When I was still pregnant and maybe sometimes during the night I woke up, we saw the reflection of the water on the ceiling and it was fantastic. That's amazing. Yeah, and when you walk with a baby at three o'clock in the morning, you have this perception, it's not that bad. Spending night.