SSStudio and Axiis design a residential sanctuary on Via della Spiga that reimagines the luxury retail experience as intimate domestic space.
On Via della Spiga 30, where Milan’s fashion quarter moves with the rhythm of commerce and display, Malo House introduces a different proposition altogether. The newly opened flagship for the Florentine cashmere house unfolds not as a shop but as a lived-in apartment, a sequenced domestic interior where clients encounter the brand through the language of home rather than exhibition.
The design, developed by SSStudio and Axiis, translates a deceptively simple brief into spatial poetry: interpret Malo’s world of cashmere, color and craft through the proportions and warmth of a private Milanese residence. The architects responded with restraint, layering warm wood, textured walls, soft carpets, and satin brass details across two levels that accommodate both intimate appointments and larger private events. A library, salotto, and carefully lit shelving of folded cashmere create the visual and sensory markers of a curated home.
The design lineage is deliberate. Gio Ponti’s rigor and Carlo Scarpa‘s material intelligence inform every decision, expressed not through homage but through living sensibility, texture, light and use. This is contemporary Italian design that does not announce itself, working instead through proportion and presence. The wooden wall surfaces read as a subtle architectural gesture, their grain and finish essential to the spatial experience. Brass details catch light without drawing attention. The interiors breathe.
Furniture curation carries equal weight in the design proposition, yet stays away from a typical fashion retail furniture selection. Rather than creating context for objects, SSStudio and Axiis selected pieces that embody the same values Malo pursues in a garment: proportion, tactility, presence and ease. Living Divani, the Italian house known for its quiet architectural approach to seating and surfaces, supplies the core collection. These pieces read as architecture themselves, their clean lines and considered proportions responding to the room’s spatial logic rather than dominating it.
Secondary pieces layer in further refinement within the interior design. Marco Lavit’s Lemni armchair, Arik Levy’s Wedge table with its sculptural yet linear presence, Mist-o’s Kasumi low tables, and Keiji Takeuchi’s Kiwi table each contribute texture and proportion without excess. The selection reads as curatorial restraint, the kind of material intelligence that defines both Malo’s knitwear and the Italian design tradition the house draws from.
The two-level organization allows for programmatic flexibility. Ground floor spaces function as the primary client experience, while the upper level accommodates private appointments, collection previews and member-only events. During the June opening, the space hosted an intimate dinner for the members of press that captured precisely what the design intends: hospitality rooted in care, proximity and tactile experience rather than transaction.
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Finally, Malo House Milan showcases a strong shift in how luxury retail might operate in the contemporary moment. Rather than theater or display, the space offers something more enduring: the sensibility of a cultivated home where exceptional cashmere and thoughtful production meet clients as something to be lived with over time. SSStudio and Axiis have an interior manifesto, one where material intelligence, spatial proportion and the lineage of Italian design converge in a single room sequence on one of Milan’s most storied streets.
