Architects:co.arch studio

Area:250m²

Year:2025

Photographs:Simone Bossi

Manufacturers:Artemide,Egoluce,Genuit

Category:Hospitality Architecture,Bar,Refurbishment

Lead Team:Andrea Pezzoli

Design Team:Giulia Urciuoli, Matteo Torti, Gaia Uslenghi, Federica Leonardi

Interior Design:OTS

General Contractor:RCM

City:Milano

Country:Italy

Text description provided by the architects. In the Certosa District, located in the north-west of Milan, an area undergoing a major regeneration project promoted by RealStep and today Milan's most vibrant gastronomic hub, stands an early 20th-century villa that has been many things over time: a slaughterhouse, a squat, a forgotten fragment of the city. Today, it is Club Giovanile Milano, a space that brings together dining, a listening bar, and live music.

The project, promoted by RealStep, stems from the idea of bringing fresh energy into the district and was entrusted to co.arch studio (arch. Andrea Pezzoli, arch. Giulia Urciuoli), who embraced a clear challenge: to preserve the historic character of the villa without taming it, and instead highlight it through openly contemporary interventions.

A restoration that tells stories - The original materials, cement tiles, stuccoes, period lettering, were carefully restored. Yet the building systems, deliberately left exposed, cut across ceilings and walls like metallic veins, evoking an industrial, Dadaist, cyberpunk aesthetic. Unsurprisingly, the references range from Terry Gilliam's Brazil to Akira to retro-futuristic dystopias and visionary imaginaries. The Genuit exposed steel ducts here become more than a technical solution: a design device capable of layering the narrative, adding a new skin to the walls. The metal reflects, interrupts, and converses with irregular surfaces, underlining the temporal gap between past and present.

Two souls, one stage - Inside, two large halls host live music and dedicated listening sessions. The acoustics, fine-tuned by Labirinti Acustici, intertwine with interiors designed by Ots – Off the Shelf, balancing technical precision with creative freedom. By day, it works as a restaurant and listening bar; by night, it turns into an urban stage.

A revealed skin - The building envelope follows the same logic: the villa was "stripped back," freed from accumulated layers to reveal cornices, decorative frames, and the historic inscription SUINI DA MACELLO ("pigs for slaughter"), a memory etched into the architecture itself. An ironic yet radical gesture that ties the new function to its past without erasing it.

Contemporary grafts - Two interventions redefine the façade: a large shopfront window opening onto the street, drawing the city inside while hosting the neon sign of the club, and an external staircase in steel and perforated sheet metal, connecting the halls and extending into a terrace that becomes part of the musical experience.

A villa against the current - Club Giovanile Milano sits alongside La Forgiatura, another RealStep-promoted redevelopment. Yet here the language is intentionally contrasting. If La Forgiatura is a contemporary campus of innovation, the villa plays the card of anomaly: as if a 1930s relic had landed in the middle of the new district, refusing assimilation and instead amplifying its difference.

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