In Milan, designers Fabiola di Virgilio and Andrea Rosso have reimagined a 1930s apartment into Casa REdDUO. The duo behind REdDUO, known for their material-driven homewares and custom interiors, have transformed the once timeworn residence into a hybrid home and studio where heritage and intuition guide every decision.

What attracted you to this area of Milan, and what was your first impression of the apartment?

Andrea Rosso: Casa REdDUO sits in Milan’s eastern side, close to Porta Venezia. It’s a place where classic Milanese architecture meets multicultural energy, a mix that perfectly reflects our way of seeing the world. The building dates back to the 1930s and has lived through several design eras—the 1970s and 1990s left visible marks on its walls, floors and details.

When we discovered it, we immediately felt its spirit. It wasn’t a neutral space but one full of narrative—terrazzo fragments, textured paints and, most surprisingly, a hidden speakeasy bar behind a portrait.
Those existing elements became our starting point. We wanted to honour the memory embedded in its layers while giving it a contemporary feel.

What did you set out to create in the interior spaces?

Fabiola di Virgilio: We wanted to create a home and studio that could breathe together—a fluid dialogue between work and life, heritage and modernity. We didn’t approach it as a renovation, but as a listening exercise.

Casa REdDUO evolved naturally, guided by the building’s own rhythm. Rather than designing every inch, we let intuition lead the process, adapting, layering and allowing each room to find its voice. The result is not a perfect interior, but a living organism that evolves as we do.

Guided by the original home while responding to the practicalities of family life, Manifold’s redesign in Melbourne’s inner-south balances character with clarity. Refreshed with all-white fretwork, the renewed heritage details sit within interiors that value the home’s original proportions, while a replan elevates functionality.

Manifold director Lachlan Cooper notes that the residence had “inherent charm, but previous renovations had left the spaces feeling disjointed and without character”. The street is lined with Victorian-era terraces, “so the house needed to remain embedded in its context—not a bold contrast, but a tactful evolution of what was already there.”

Moving from a larger house nearby, “the priority was creating a sense of generosity and coherence without overwhelming the terrace’s scale. We gave each room its own identity based on use, while ensuring the flow between spaces felt natural,” he continues. “Storage was integrated carefully, so it supported daily life without reading as built-in everywhere.”

There is nothing accidental about the way this Byron Bay townhouse feels. There is a warm earthiness that creates a sense of ease—something that Melbourne studio Hecker Guthrie worked prudently to achieve.

The property sits within a small block of brick townhouses on a hillside in Byron Bay. Built in the late eighties, it was unremarkable from the street, and left largely untouched in the intervening decades.
For Stacey van Harn, Hecker Guthrie director and interior designer, the original interiors were a time capsule of a coastal development from another era. But the design team saw how much potential remained beneath the dated shell. Like, for instance, the texture of the painted brickwork, and the Tongue & Groove timber ceilings in the bedrooms. With a judicious eye, they found ways to work with what was already there rather than against it.

The resulting renovation comes to life with a rich and inviting material palette. Deep terracotta floor tiles from Artedomus establish the tone from the ground up, running continuously from inside to outside. What immediately catches the eye is an unusually wide grout line that becomes one of the project’s most distinctive details.

A commitment to tactility carries across every surface: textured plaster wraps walls and ceilings in a single, seamless gesture, while the bathrooms are finished in poured terrazzo and waterproof micro-cement in the same warm, ochre tones. Each room throughout the home receives the same attention to materiality, creating a sense of wholeness that makes the compact floorplan feel far more generous than it is.

Sam Cox: Growing up on a small farm in central Victoria, with a father devoted to conservation work, I developed an early connection to the land. My father’s passion fostered my interest in conservation and revegetation, and in the importance of caring for both farmers and the landscape. After finishing school, I wasn’t sure of my career direction, so I decided to travel and spent nine months working on conservation and environmental projects in New Zealand, Fiji and America. All of these experiences strengthened my Your work is quite structured and connection to nature and confirmed that I wanted to build a career outdoors, which aligned with my upbringing.

You were Australian landscape designer Gordon Ford’s last apprentice. Like you, I have a deep appreciation of his work, and I am envious that you got to work with him. How did you meet Ford, and what would you say were the most valuable lessons he taught you?

Sam Cox: We met by chance, actually. I was working for a retired landscaper named Maggie Edwards, who knew Gordon Ford and saw that I was enjoying what we were doing, so she introduced me to him before I went travelling after high school. What began as a week of work experience with Gordon turned into three and a half years by his side. I quickly learned that his vast knowledge far outweighed anything I could learn in a classroom. His naturalistic style, deep knowledge of native plants, focus on working with your hands and genuine appetite for the physical labour involved left a profound mark on me. All of these elements are a true connection to the outcome. I worked with him right up until he passed away, and his generosity, with his knowledge and unwavering commitment to the craft, remain among the most important lessons of my career.

Designed by Melbourne-based architecture and design studio Jolson, this fortress-like home is a numbers game. Clad in 26,000 handmade bricks, it’s a soaring 14 metres high and sits on a modest 280m2.

The sense of arrival is a dramatic one as the commanding, geometric façade gives way to a lush forecourt filled with greenery. Internally, the home is a discreet refuge, crafted in warm Turkish limestone and defined by sculptural edges used to delineate space. Crossing the threshold “marks a pivotal moment of transformation,” Jolson founder and principal Stephen Jolson explains. “Residents leave the harsh urban context behind and enter a tranquil oasis. Once inside, a softer language emerges, creating a dialogue between the solidity of the exterior and the luminosity within—a balance between protection and openness.”

Light pours into the interiors from spliced openings, skylights, hanging voids and terraces woven with cascading vines. Conceived by landscape design studio Florian Wild, the greenery tempers the structural form and serves as a reminder that the natural world is never far away. Jolson co-director Mat Wright says that the intention is for the planting to, over time, “form a living veil across the building’s skin, softening its robust materiality”.

Lit from above, a central staircase connects all four levels in one “sculptural sweep, inviting daylight to dance across the polished walls,” Wright says. A custom jewellery-like pendant by Lindsey Adelman, crafted from hand-blown glass flecked with gold, is a detailed addition to the otherwise restrained void.

HiAvens exists in its surrounding landscape like a structure from a Kubrick film: a colossal mass of stone and concrete that defies immediate stylistic categorisation. A modern farmhouse? A monument to minimalism? Grounded in the Cotswolds’ rolling open fields, this contemporary residence’s external structure was designed by Javelin Block together with BPN Architects. Its interiors, by London-based architecture and interiors firm McLaren Excell, are defined by natural, tactile materials and tonal continuity, creating spaces that feel organically ‘inevitable’ rather than stylised.

Architect and McLaren Excell director, Luke McLaren, says that consistency was the natural order in designing HiAvens— the key to achieving a cohesive alignment between the residence’s interiors and exterior. “The exterior expresses mass, rhythm and protection, and the interiors mirror this through a unified palette and a disciplined approach to detailing,” he explains.

“Because material integrity was non-negotiable, the house gains refinement through reduction rather than addition. The courtyards also play a significant role. They pull light into the core of the plan and give each room a unique relationship with the landscape, which generates individuality within an otherwise cohesive architectural framework,” he adds.

Five years ago, art historian, advisor and auction specialist Sarah Vanwelden returned to Antwerp to co-found Newchild Gallery alongside artist and architect Chandler Noah and artist Diego Castano, who split their time between Barcelona and New York. Entering the city’s established art scene, the trio dedicated themselves to a small group of diverse artists, mainly outside of Belgium and Europe.

From the gallery’s infancy, Vanwelden hosted artists at Antwerp’s Hotel Pilar, designed by the interior and architecture studio Contekst, co-founded by Sam Peeters and Toon Martens. “I had been following Contekst’s work for a while. My two best friends had stayed at the hotel before engaging the studio for their own renovation,” Vanwelden recalls. Connecting over a love of collecting art, a friendship quickly formed. “After a couple of years of living in my apartment, it became obvious to collaborate with Contekst on its redesign.”

Vanwelden had spent many years living in London, using her apartment above the gallery only for brief stays. “It was such a Y2K apartment: blue light, Zebra print, metallic. But I fell in love with the townhouse’s width and ceiling height, which isn’t typical of a late 19th-century townhouse here.” Enlarged by the previous owners’ extension, Contekst turned their architectural focus to improving circulation on the second floor, for privacy—every space had a sliding door—and to lure sunlight into its darker spaces.

From the outset, Vanwelden wanted her home to feel distinct from Newchild Gallery, designed by co-founder Chandler Noah. “While I admire the design, I was seeking more colour in my own spaces. Very early on, Contekst came up with the idea of using Rose Aurore marble,” she says. “It has a lot of gravitas, it’s old-world, but it’s light and joyful.” Sharing the same white “with a slight hint of pink” walls as the gallery, Vanwelden credits Contekst for the home’s aquamarine corridor and dressing space. “The corridor is a completely unexpected bolt of colour,” she adds.

Some collaborations begin with a tightly defined brief, others with a shared sensibility. For Muci founders and architects Chris Mullaney and Steani Cilliers, meeting Michelle Park and Andrés Pichel, husband and wife and founders of LOHAS, specialists in a wide range of ceramic building materials, it was very much the latter. Long before plans were drawn, both parties gravitated toward the same ideals: natural materials, longevity and a reverence for craft. When Park and Pichel approached Muci to reimagine their narrow terrace in Sydney’s Woollahra Heritage Conservation Area, an immediate alignment formed.

The couple had lived in the late-Victorian home for several years, long enough to understand its inherent limitations: dim interiors, awkward circulation and a disjointed floor plan that often results from decades of incremental additions.

Their ambition, however, was not to erase the home’s character but to restore coherence and bring a sense of calm and retreat. With two young children, they needed spaces to work intuitively and support family life; spaces that felt durable yet elevated, qualities they saw daily in the materials they curate professionally. “After presenting our first concepts, Andrés shared a drawing of little feet and arrows showing the pattern of how the family would move through the house each day,” Cilliers recalls. “It really set the tone for the intensity and thoughtfulness of the collaboration.”