✕

Designed with dramatic restraint by Italian product and interior designer Gio Tirotto, the luminous FENIX Scenario in Milan’s Brera district is more than a showcase for the matte-laminate material developed by Arpa Industriale it’s named for—it is also a hub for parent company Broadview Holding’s other brands, which include Formica and Trespa. According to Tirotto, the client wanted a flexible venue that could shift from commercial showroom to meeting center to exhibition gallery.

The lighting of a company’s design hub in Milan includes skylight-mimicking luminaires in the basement to create a pleasing space for its occupants (above and top). Photo © Federico Villa, click to enlarge.

The project occupies the two lower floors of a corner building built in the 19^th century. While a generously glazed ground-floor space, containing displays and a materials library, is filled with daylight—so much so that Tirotto (using Fenix as a primary surface) created a loft, niches, and tall pivot doors that can mitigate it—the offices in the windowless basement are devoid of sun. To provide a comfortable, congenial environment there, the designer painted the existing vaulted brick ceiling in the main work area white and suspended a pair of linear bidirectional LED fixtures along its length for ambient and task light. Then he inserted, into custom monitor-like housing (with discreet side doors for access), four luminaires that mimic the aura of daylight. These are installed along the room’s outer wall above planters—their wires snaking behind a plasterboard wall, to the electrical supply beneath the raised porcelain-tile floor.