When the Italian jewelry designer Bea Bongiasca, 34, founded her namesake brand in 2014, she set out to create a world where whimsy reigns. Her sculptural, irreverent collections have included curling bright yellow, orange and purple enameled rings that resemble jewel-encrusted vines, and knotlike silver earrings inspired by taralli, the savory biscuits from Puglia, where her grandmother was born. And while it’s natural for an artist’s private space to become an extension of their work, that’s especially true of Bongiasca’s 800-square-foot Milan apartment. “It’s designed like a box,” she says of the compact two-story loft awash in acid green and hot pink. “Like a jewelry box, I guess.”
On a crisp winter day, Bongiasca swishes down her home’s Barbie pink staircase wearing a voluminous pair of floral-print cargo pants and a matching crop top, with her British longhair cat, Fat Momo, trailing at her heels. Bongiasca was born not far from her apartment, which overlooks the ancient walnut and oak trees of Milan’s Sempione Park. She’s spent most of her life in the city, save for a few years in London, where she studied jewelry design at Central Saint Martins.
Her building, with its gridlike gray stone facade, was designed in 1965 by the architect and urban planner Giulio Minoletti, best known for his public and industrial projects across and outside Milan. Compared to the spacious, family-oriented apartment blocks common in the neighborhood, it has an unusual composition: four floors of nearly identical studios. The design was inspired by the two-story lofts that make up the modernist architect Le Corbusier’s 1952 Unité d’Habitation in Marseille, France, and was commissioned by Alitalia, the now-defunct Italian airline, to provide homes for its pilots. It was known as a casa albergo, or “house hotel” — a warren of bachelor pads in the heart of Milan.
“Since the building was designed in the 1960s, we wanted to create a homage to that era,” Bongiasca says of the apartment’s interior, which centers on a spacious conversation pit — composed of modular dark red cubes that can be extracted and used as stools — installed beneath the chartreuse living room’s 13-foot ceiling. The space was designed by the architect Massimiliano Locatelli, a longtime friend of Bongiasca’s mother who also designed her childhood bedroom and later her boutique on Via Solferino, both in shades of cotton candy pink.
For this project, however, Bongiasca’s references were sexier and more grown-up; they included Verner Panton’s psychedelic “Visiona 2” exhibition at the 1970 Cologne Furniture Fair and a brothel scene in the American director’s Paul Schrader’s 1985 film “Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters.” The latter informed the design of the bedroom loft, which, like the sleeping area in the movie, is magenta and cocooned by venetian blinds. Bongiasca’s version, though, includes distinctive artworks like a 2015 print by the Japanese illustrator Hajime Sorayama of embracing robots, titled “The Kiss.”
Bongiasca often travels to Asia and she appreciates the hyper-pop aesthetic of Japanese anime and manga comics. In the kitchen, which has era-appropriate lime green linoleum floor tiles, is a pair of shelves filled with objects and books picked up on her trips to the country, including several Sailor Moon graphic novels; an array of cat figurines, Hello Kitty and waving maneki neko among them; and a plush version of one of the scowling little girls often painted by the Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara.
The room’s also where she keeps her rose gold karaoke microphone — which she uses when her favorite neighborhood joint, Diamante, is closed. She recently purchased a Cotodama stereo from Japan that displays the lyrics to whichever song is being played. Despite its compact size, the apartment can fit a surprising number of people for parties, as evidenced by a video Bongiasca pulls up on her phone of a couple dozen friends piled in and around the conversation pit. Some are perched on the removable magenta blocks in the center; others are draped across the surrounding carpet; a few are smoking on the balcony outside the windows.
Indeed, the charm of her home — beyond the design — is its hidden-away feeling. Though her own unit faces away from the park, when Minoletti was designing the apartments he felt it was unfair for half of them to be denied the tranquil views of Sempione. So, in an empty lot behind the building, he planted a thick copse of pine trees that have since grown to towering heights. In the daylight, the trees multiply ad infinitum in the living room’s mirrored walls, creating the impression of a faceted disco ball suspended in the green.
