BEAUTY: Interiors--The Brutalist Homes of Vincenzo de Cotiis

Apropos of yesterday's Brutalist swimming pools here, Italian architect and interior/furnishings designer Vincenzo De Cotiis created a jaw dropping house on the outskirts of Milan for an art collecting couple. De Cotiis has a fondness for Brutalism and Minimalism but with maximalist flourishes of texture and color here and there. So he created a series of concrete boxes that, because of privacy issues, look inward to a central courtyard. The expanse of space itself is luxurious even without anything in it, but the furnishings, with a sexy, 70s air, are delightful. De Cotiis also designs and fabricates his own pieces out of raw or recycled material like the fiberglass seats, made of material salvaged from old boats, at the outdoor eating area (third image down). Especially jaw dropping is the cubist light fixture jutting down over the dining room table. Wow...just...wow.

https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/vincenzo-de-cotiis-crafts-a-serene-brutalist-residence-in-italy

And for his own home in Milan, De Cottis refinished an apartment in the city’s elegant Corso Magenta district.
The New York Times notes of De Cotiis, "Perhaps because he grew up in a country that offhandedly integrates its ruins and monuments into daily life, neither fetishizing them nor letting them be bulldozed for high rises, De Cotiis feels free, even compelled, to explore the ambient tension between crumbling antiquity and futuristic minimalism...His work embodies Italy’s fluency with the lexicons of both decay and high Modernism, a complicated language that in the developed world might be shared only by the Japanese...His aesthetic is simultaneously clinical and tumbledown: archaeological-dig-meets-mad-scientist-laboratorio. In his work, time periods casually collide and elide."

Indeed, he spent a great amount of time and took painstaking care to remove layer upon layer of paint and wallpaper from all the walls and millwork (although the 200-year old parquet floor was left untouched). Now down to raw wood and plaster, the materials show their age and ghost traces of colors that came before. That in itself is a spectacular design gesture--one that embodies what the Times said of him, above--but he adds...or subtracts depending on how one looks at it. He adds sleek, minimalistic yet Neolithic-looking furnishings while at the same time expertly accentuating the negative space with restrained arrangements. His vision reminds me of the furniture and furnishings created by fashion designer Rick Owens, here.

He added a thick brass baseboard to all walls which serves to hide cables so there is nothing visible to mar the aesthetic.

Huge resin sheets, cast off-site, are joined and laid down like carpets. Look at the large white one inset into the floor under the dining table (whose underside is lined with polished brass) and Platner chairs.

The library features a daybed covered in a dull pink velvet hand-dyed to match the faded terra cotta of the walls.

The dark, sensual master bathroom might be the most ornamented space with some exquisite busts and sculptures. The walls, counter and sink are made from the same rare dark green and pink marble from Brazil. And you can spot semi-flush mount versions of the incredible cube lights from the dining room in the previous home, above!

https://www.architecturaldigest.in/content/milan-architecture-home-refurbishment/#s-cust0
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/20/t-magazine/vincenzo-de-cotiis-milan-home.html

http://www.decotiis.it/