Milan Home of Industrial Designer Francesco Faccin

The rise and rise of styling means that nowadays things are rarely what they seem. Call it artful composition or plain trickery; the reality is that most of the images we see are a little (or very) different to the real deal. Whether it’s due to loaned furniture, over-styling, artificial lighting, a good angle or poetic license with Photoshop, a lot of projects have us yearning for something a little more personal and a little less staged. What does the space really look like? How does it really function? How does it feel when it’s inhabited day-to-day – is it comfortable and does it really ‘work’?

This brings us to the reason why we find the Milan home of industrial designer Francesco Faccin so enormously appealing – an accumulation of stories, memory and history, it is as much about the ‘art of living’ as the elements of design and decoration at play. Set within a c.1850 building originally designed by Carlo Maciachini, Faccin’s heritage apartment has an aristocratic history of high-profile Milanese tenants in music, politics and the arts. Several unsympathetic renovations had damaged the unique personality of the space, so it became Faccin’s mission to restore it to its former glory.

Handy by trade, Faccin did everything on his own, learning to plaster, install electrical cables, build walls and lay tiles to get the job done. The resulting interior is hot, seriously hot. From its quirky palette of olive green, neon orange and butter yellow, to its crooked walls (a result of a WW2 bombing), there’s nothing pretentious about it.

Faccin successfully returned walls, opened up windows and removed a false ceiling to reveal the apartment’s original 4.2 metre vaulted ceiling roof. He also made a wooden loft and replaced the doors throughout the apartment with those retrieved from a demolished old house. Furnished with some of Faccin’s designs and a whole lot of trinkets collected in a lifetime, the apartment is the spatial embodiment of a person with true style. The real deal; we’ll take this unpolished gem over a sparkly diamond (probably crystal) any day.