The Milanese home of Vittorio Gregotti where architecture and art live together

In the early 1960s, Milan was one of the main laboratories of Italian architecture. The city was expanding, the entrepreneurial bourgeoisie was building new homes, and the domestic interior became a field of experimentation—where modernism, design, and art could enter into dialogue. It was also the moment when many young architects began to measure themselves against a theme destined to become central to Milanese culture: the home as a space of identity and social representation, as well as a place of dwelling. One of them was Vittorio Gregotti, still far from the role he would later assume in Italian architectural culture. He was 36 when, in 1963, his grandfather Quinto Gregotti asked him to rethink the interiors of the family apartment on Via Bonaventura Cavalieri. More than a commission in the traditional sense, it was a test case and a gesture of trust: who better than a grandson—and a promising young architect—to hold together architecture, collecting, and everyday life, an interweaving that here quite literally begins within the family. That same trust spans generations and reaches the present day, as Maria Gregotti reopens the house, transforming it into a private home gallery.

Maria Gregotti

“The apartment was the home of my great-grandparents, Quinto Gregotti and Savina. He was a passionate art lover and a tireless visitor to the Venice Biennale and Rome’s Quadriennale,” Maria Gregotti says. “He collected mainly twentieth-century Italian art, closely following the debates of his time and, over the years, building a collection shaped by direct relationships and genuine friendships.”

To give just one example, before moving to Via Bonaventura Cavalieri Quinto lived on Via Mosè Bianchi, just a short walk from Mario Sironi—a proximity that captures the tastes, influences, and cultural climate of Milan in those years. “I think that detail shows how deeply art was woven into his everyday life, not only as a collection but as a living network of relationships.”

The one Quinto is going to move into can only be "a modern and deeply lived-in house, where architecture and collection dialogued naturally and where art became an opportunity for meetings, conversations and cultural exchange."

To achieve that result, in 1963 Vittorio Gregotti worked on the apartment’s interiors, quickly realizing he could not simply reshuffle the rooms: instead, he designed a home conceived to live alongside the artworks and the family’s cultural life. The original layout has been preserved with great care, and many elements from that period remain in place. Built-in 1960s cabinetry is integrated into the architecture and sets the rhythm of the rooms; slender steel-framed windows define the openings, while modernist handles punctuate the surfaces.

Among her favorite details, Maria Gregotti points to “the Lasa marble profiles, which run through the main rooms, framing doors and passages with great sobriety.” She also highlights “the fixtures with slender steel profiles and Caccia Dominioni handles, which convey the precision and rigor typical of Italian modernism of those years.” One of the most striking elements is the large bookcase that incorporates a structural column of the building. Originally conceived as a bar cabinet, it has over time become an integral part of the architecture. “It is a very important element: it expresses an idea of space in which structure and furniture become part of the same composition.” Equally forward-looking are the steel rails designed to hang and easily replace the artworks—especially in light of the role the house plays today. “They were conceived to allow the display to change over time. For Vittorio, art was not a decorative element, but a structural presence within the domestic space.”

Maria Gregotti

Today, this architectural framework is layered with a stratification of furnishings that reflects the family’s history and a desire to keep the dialogue between past and present alive. Alongside the elements designed by Vittorio Gregotti in the 1960s appear pieces connected to the family’s entrepreneurial history, as well as icons of Italian design from the second half of the twentieth century. Here, the Cavour chairs—designed by Vittorio Gregotti with Lodovico Meneghetti and Giotto Stoppino in the late 1950s—sit alongside seating by Marco Zanuso. A table designed by Gregotti himself accompanies furniture linked to the history of the family’s textile company, Bossi. The attention to textiles—an aspect that for decades has been central to the Gregotti family’s entrepreneurial activity—returns in the choice of contemporary elements, such as the Soriana armchair by Afra and Tobia Scarpa for Cassina, selected here in its denim version.

Maria Gregotti recalls: “When my father entrusted me with the apartment, he also handed me a very special book. Inside was a dedication that ended with the words, ‘so that you may continue.’” From that moment the idea of reopening the house began to take shape. After years in which the apartment had been rented out, she imagined it once again as a space capable of sustaining the cultural vocation that had defined it from the beginning.

Maria Gregotti

Having grown up in a family of collectors, Maria Gregotti collects herself and, despite her young age, has already developed a keen understanding of the needs and aspirations of today’s patrons. She envisions Casa Gregotti as a place where the domestic dimension can once again enter into dialogue with art and contemporary collecting. “I call Casa Gregotti a private home gallery because it was born—and remains—first and foremost a House, with a capital H. It is not a traditional exhibition space, but a domestic place where art coexists with everyday life.” The idea is not to turn the house into a gallery, but to reactivate a domestic space as a meeting place for artists, gallerists, and collectors, while preserving the private dimension that has always defined its history.

This is not an exhibition space open to the public in the traditional sense, but rather a “salon”: activities take place by invitation, within a deliberately selected context. An intimate setting that encourages dialogue and direct encounters with artworks and artists, allowing visitors to feel at ease, ask questions, and gradually build a sense of familiarity with the works. Reopening it today therefore means not only restoring life to a piece of Milanese modernist domestic architecture, but also continuing a tradition deeply rooted in the city’s culture: that of a form of collecting capable of supporting the art of its own time. A family story that links living, collecting, and sharing art—one that Maria Gregotti hopes will continue into future generations.

The Casa Gregotti program began with a collaboration with Gió Marconi gallery, bringing historical and contemporary works into dialogue—including pieces by Lucio Fontana placed alongside those of Allison Katz. The current exhibition, To Live an Environment – Six Artists on the Theme of Dwelling (January 23–March 22, 2026), curated by Angela Madesani, reflects on the relationship between art and domestic space. Works by Luca Gilli, Michele Guido, Marco Andrea Magni, Elena Modorati, Luca Pancrazzi, and Elisabeth Scherffig are distributed throughout the rooms of the house and placed in dialogue with pieces from the family collection, including works by Sironi, Sant’Elia, and Morandi. As curator Angela Madesani explains, the exhibition stems from the desire to avoid the neutrality of the white cube: “Rather than constructing a traditional display, the idea was to create a coexistence between the works and the house. The works are not isolated, but become part of the life of the space—almost as if they had always been there.”