This Chic Milanese Apartment Is Brimming With History
There is a sense of homecoming when you move into a building you have known most of your life. When my partner Nicolò Castellini Baldissera and I were preparing to move out of Casa degli Atellani, his family’s seat in Milan for five generations, a chance phone call led us to our current home, a top-floor apartment in a palazzo in the Brera neighborhood.
The 1,200-square-foot apartment is in a building owned by Nicolò’s childhood best friend, Bruno Sforni, and it was during a casual call that Sforni mentioned that it was vacant. In 2022 Bernard Arnault bought Casa degli Atellani—including the Leonardo da Vinci vineyard at its center—and we, along with Nicolò’s father Piero and numerous other family members who lived in the family compound, were looking for new homes.
Nicolò met Sforni when they were classics students in high school in Milan with a shared love of the arts. He often visited his friend’s family home, the Palazzo Recalcati Tagliasacchi. “I spent countless afternoons in their drawing room overlooking the garden, with the Orto Botanico di Brera’s towering trees just beyond the walls,” Nicolò says. “It was a house filled with women: Bruno’s mother, sisters, grandmothers. Even their dogs were female. And it held treasures: In his late father’s study, I remember being awestruck by a collection of Modigliani drawings, an early lesson in art connoisseurship that would stay with me.”
Moving into this palazzo all these decades later has felt, for him, like a return to those memories. Sforni still lives downstairs; we sometimes hear music from his piano playing echo up from the courtyard. Over the decade that Nicolò and I have lived together, I have come to cherish his connections to family and friends. For me, a writer and producer who works from home, and an American in Milan, discovering this sense of community has become an essential part of my experience in Italy.
The apartment needed to be updated, which is why it sat on the market for a time. But I was undaunted. I’ve seen Nicolò transform countless spaces for himself and for his clients. He is a wonder with color and blending objects to create a story in any room. While we did renovate the kitchen and bathrooms, much of the transformation in the rest of the apartment relied on the strategic use of paint and texture.
As a figlio d’arte (child of artists), Nicolò often draws upon the work of his great-grandfather, the architect Piero Portaluppi, for inspiration. His influence is apparent in many of the collections Nicolò has designed, including wallpaper for PictaLab Milano, carpets for Gucci, and furniture for Casa Tosca, the company we co-founded in 2020.
Our apartment was built in 1523 and renovated in 1828. Nicolò riffed on that history by incorporating numerous Italian touches, from the Visconti sun painted on the drawing room’s ceiling to the guestroom’s framed walls, which are in a pastel palette inspired by 18th-century Venice. The rest is a reflection of our wanderlust, with finds from across Europe and Morocco, where we also have a home.
From Casa degli Atellani we brought a number of pieces: a round Portaluppi table that was in Nicolò’s great-grandparents’ dining room; a magenta and moss Agra rug that miraculously fits our new living room; and even the wall-to-wall library, which Nicolò designed decades ago for a -cousin’s apartment. Other pieces were designed fresh for the space, such as the kelly green sofa and the striped living room curtains, in a fabric that forms part of the collection Nicolò designed last year for C&C Milano, the textile company he co-owns with his father and cousins.
Living Room
The living room of Nicolò Castellini Baldissera and Christopher Garis’s apartment, in Milan’s Brera neighborhood, features a custom sofa.
Living Room
An Anish Kapoor artwork hangs above a Baroque Italian commode in the living room. The original beam ceiling was hand-painted by PictaLab Milano.
Vestibule
The vestibule features a hand-painted faux boiserie design. An 18th-century Venetian desk stands under a work by Francis Picabia.
Powder Room
The powder room features Castellini Baldissera’s wallpaper designs for PictaLab Milano, Elenico, on the walls, and Zeus, on the ceiling. The sconce is by Allegra Hicks, and the sideboard is by Piero Portaluppi.
Primary Bathroom
The primary bathroom features towels embroidered with Castellini Baldissera's initials.
Guest Bedroom
In the guest bedroom, the portrait, by Guido Tallone, is of Castellini Baldissera’s grandmother, the Contessa di Collalto. The Rococo bed is Venetian and the pillows and bed linens by C&C Milano.
Guest Bedroom
A pair of 19th-century Venetian lanterns frame an 1820s Baltic desk in the guest bedroom.
For the wall treatments, Nicolò worked with longtime collaborators at PictaLab Milano. “We have a shorthand,” Nicolò explains. “Each new project is a chance to refine past ideas.” In the main bedroom they created a textured effect reminiscent of antique velvet, inspired by a palazzo they had worked on in Genoa, while in the living room the faded pink was inspired by the distressed external walls of Venetian palazzos. In the entrance the dated wood paneling was enhanced with a faux boiserie overpaint.
“This house makes me smile,” Nicolò told me. “It is an amalgamation of old and new, filled with the collections of a lifetime and positioned in my favorite corner of the city. We’re very lucky to live here.” I couldn’t agree more. The apartment is a reflection of our lives—layered, storied, and personal.
This story originally appeared in the April 2025 issue of Elle Decor. SUBSCRIBE
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