Architecture in Colour series treats colour as an architectural instrument rather than decoration—one that shapes space, proportion, and emotional experience as powerfully as form and light.
Rather than erasing the apartment’s post-war character, Trame Studio approaches its renovation as an exercise in continuity, allowing the existing interior to become the starting point for a new domestic identity. Emerging from the home’s original burgundy cement-tile floor, Klein blue, coral and purple move across surfaces, thresholds and furnishings, while subtle alterations open sightlines and amplify natural light. Colour becomes architectural: articulating distinct domestic territories while binding them into a vivid whole.
Milan’s residential fabric reflects decades of changing domestic life, with its 1940s apartments carrying distinct traces of the city’s post-war history. Today, these interiors offer a layered backdrop where original details, materials and proportions can meet contemporary ways of living without erasing the character of the existing home.
For this Milan apartment, Trame Studio takes precisely this condition as its starting point. Rather than radically restructuring the interior, the project works with what is already there, preserving the character of the existing home while identifying a small number of interventions capable of producing a much broader spatial transformation.
The approach is one of subtraction, opening and recalibration.
The focus shifts to the relationships between the spaces, creating a more continuous sequence from the entrance towards the kitchen and living area. While the existing rooms retain their individual identities, their boundaries become less absolute, allowing views and natural light to extend further into the apartment.
One of the most significant gestures concerns the wall that originally marked the entrance.
Lowered and redesigned, it no longer operates as a conventional partition. It becomes a hybrid architectural element, simultaneously defining the threshold, incorporating storage and everyday functions, and maintaining visual connections with the living space. Its role is therefore not simply to separate, but to mediate between different degrees of privacy and openness.
This subtle transformation reflects the broader logic of the project, where spatial continuity is achieved without eliminating boundaries altogether. Instead, they become more porous, functional and responsive to everyday life.
Walls take on the role of furniture, partitions act as filters, and the entrance becomes an integral part of the living sequence rather than a separate space.
Material choices reinforce this dialogue between continuity and change.
The original cement tile floor, dating from the apartment’s 1940s origins, is retained as a tangible trace of its previous life and informs the new material palette, creating a dialogue between the apartment’s history and its contemporary interventions.
In the darker, more inward part of the apartment, the existing flooring gives way to a pale terrazzo containing coloured and glass aggregates. Its reflective surface helps amplify the available light while establishing a subtle material relationship with the original tiles.
Colour enters this restrained framework as another way of distinguishing and connecting spaces.
The Klein blue kitchen is deliberately legible as a contemporary addition: a strong, self-contained volume inserted into the more muted atmosphere of the apartment.
In the bathroom, coral introduces a warmer chromatic counterpoint, giving the more intimate space its own identity.
Together, the two colours create moments of intensity without overwhelming the underlying material composition.
What emerges is not a renovation defined by the quantity of change, but by the precision of its gestures. The project preserves the apartment’s existing framework while subtly recalibrating its boundaries, light, material relationships and chromatic accents.
Trame Studio allows traces to remain visible—and places contemporary interventions alongside them with enough contrast to make both old and new more legible.
The result is a domestic interior in which transformation happens through adjustment rather than erasure: a quieter form of renovation that demonstrates how a few carefully positioned architectural and chromatic decisions can fundamentally alter the experience of an existing home.
Facts & Credits
Project title Casa per T
Typology Interior, Residential
Location Milan, Italy
Status Completed, 2024
Architecture Trame studio
Photography Riccardo Giancola
This project was submitted to Archisearch through the “Submit a Story” feature, where architects, designers, and creatives are invited to share their work for publication.