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The idea of living in Palazzo Caccia Dominioni was always an obsession for my partner, Alan. There was the shock of joy when, at the start of the first lockdown, the opportunity came to live in one of the building’s prime apartments. For all the affection we bore our old home, we decided to be led by a long-held desire. The palazzo was conceived by architect Luigi Caccia Dominioni, born 1913, and it hosted his studio and home for the entirety of his long life. It overlooks the Basilica of Sant’Ambrogio – consecrated over 1,600 years ago and rebuilt in its current form in the 12th century – which is one of the most visited churches in Milan; from our windows you can watch people congregate in the courtyard for weddings, funerals or peaceful visits on their days off.
Caccia Dominioni began construction in 1947 after his ancestral family residence on the piazza had been levelled by bombings five years earlier; for him, this project was both a modern answer and a personal homage to his lost home’s noble bones. With its horizontal bands inspired by the Renaissance frontages, the building’s façade reflects in both form and material a deep-rooted respect for its surroundings.
Until his death at just shy of 103, Caccia Dominioni – or Il Caccia as he came to be known – was a brilliant interpreter of the Lombardian tradition and one of the protagonists of postwar design in Milan. The architect (as the building’s old door- man still always calls him with gravitas) was behind the 1996 renovation of the famous Piazza San Babila, and co-founded the Azucena brand, responsible for classics like the ‘Lampada Poltrona’ lamp and the crisp, curving black lines of the ‘Nonaro’ collection. Both can be spied in our rooms, along with brasher pieces of radical design brought in to avoid the ever-present risk of turning a home into a monument.
Our apartment is on the second floor, and as the day filters in through the façade windows, the chiaroscuro effect transforms it with each passing hour. In the early morning, when the sun emerges from behind the basilica, the rooms are flooded with blinding light – a phenomenon that, though dazzling, creates not insignificant problems for the fabric of the already discoloured poufs and sofas, not to mention the photographs. Still, we refuse to block out the rays with curtains, opting to hide away anything precious – piles of paintings, pen drawings and canvases – in the built-in wardrobes that the architect secreted in the palazzo hallways.
Furnishing the place has been a delightfully creative exercise in bringing together the ancient with the contemporary (with a healthy dose of Franco Albini and Carlo Scarpa thrown in too). The idea was always to honour this Caccia Dominioni masterpiece while putting our own twist on it. We transformed two blue-lacquered beds from Azucena’s ‘S. Martino’ series, for instance, into sofas; the dining room table, meanwhile, is a prototype of the ‘Cavalletto’ model, its wooden surface left unfinished. It belonged to the apartment’s previous owner, an architecture student who used it as his worktop – it always seemed fitting to keep it in its raw form, to defy the other objects in the room. Contrast is key for both of us; it’s the best way we’ve found to respond forcefully to the vistas each window brings in.
In one corner, the 16th-century sculpture that guards our bar looks out towards the basilica; it’s mirrored by a fine example of kinetic sculpture by Anna Franceschini. The ‘Suspiral’ chairs were made by the artist Luigi Serafini – author of the cult imaginary encyclopaedia Codex Serafinianus – with whom I had the good fortune to create a pataphysical (and rather deranged) version of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi for Rome’s Teatro Argentina in 2020. In fact, it was Ubu’s vortical gidouille that inspired these chairs, with their spiralling iron structure and velvet seats that, according to a few guests, make for a most uncomfortable perch.
The apartment’s theatricality and sense of mise-en-scène comes in part from my work as a director and set designer for the theatre and opera, and in part from the place itself. The layout of the rooms retains a trace of Classicism, but, as per the architect’s design, arrests with its lack of symmetry. The result is unexpected overlays, whereby the basilica’s façade will merge here and there with an abstract painting, part of a jamb, a ceramic piece by Matteo Thun.
Antique busts and sculptures serve as doorstops, drawing the eye the wrong way. The living room is the stage for a visual dialogue between an Etruscan sarcophagus (our conversation piece par excellence) and the white monochrome above it, plus a Gaetano Pesce pouffe, an Alex Katz work and a painting by Miriam Cahn. A shadow often looms over Katz’s portrait of a boy, leaving visitors unsettled. The Gufram ‘Pratone’ – which we lifted in through the window by crane – is one of our more outlandishly dramatic props, grounded only a little by adjacent works by Larry Stanton, an American artist mentored by David Hockney.
I’ve devoted much of my time in recent years to cataloguing his extraordinary output, co-editing with his long-time partner, Arthur Lambert, the first monographic book on him. My studio’s floor-to-ceiling library is a stage for other artists that have become consuming passions, such as Lucia di Luciano. I am pleased to report that the book I’m working on about the 90-year-old – an artist who was, until recently, fairly unknown – is already peppered with her razor-sharp repartee. One such example was when, in response to my asking how pleased she was to have been invited to the Venice Biennale, she retorted that it was the Biennale that should be pleased to host her, not the other way around. Just as with Lucia, my quest as a collector is centred not on big names, but those artists with whom I have a profound connection.
There is not an object in this house that I am not able to passionately discuss and defend. I can often be heard telling the solemn tale of a disappearing New York, revived through the works I have here or there and the stories attached to them. Patrick Angus and Darrel Ellis are two artists that I especially love, who both died prematurely from Aids in 1992. I feel proud to have partly contributed to their recent rediscovery by retracing their work – an action that I repeat, in a way, every evening.
Two watercolours by Angus hang by my bedside; they are the last thing I see before I turn out the lights. ‘The object of the artist is the creation of the beautiful,’ wrote James Joyce. ‘What the beautiful is is another question.’ For me, it’s the stories that spring from the things we live with; the things that confront us every day in the intimate and protected spaces of our domestic existence.
Inspiration
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A version of this article appeared in the February 2024 issue of The World of Interiors. Learn about our subscription offers
