Alcova Inherits Villa Pestarini

 There is a house in Milan that most people have never entered, and, until recently, had no particular reason to think about. Villa Pestarini — a compact rationalist structure completed in 1939 by Franco Albini — has been a private residence ever since, never a museum, never a monument. Simply a home, which is, in its own way, the most radical thing it could be.

But Alcova has changed that. The villa stands open as a living exhibition space: the kitchen still works, the bathroom functions, the suspended marble staircase still floats beside the entrance as if defying you to ask how. And yet every room has been claimed by designers invited to think about what it means to inhabit a space already so thoroughly inhabited by history.

The ground floor is where Albini's vision is most nakedly itself — light pouring through walls of translucent glass brick, the boundary between inside and outside rendered negotiable, even moot. It is here that "Albini in Present Tense," a collaboration between Patricia Urquiola, Haworth, and Cassina, holds court: a suite of reissued furnishings including a 1947 armchair never previously produced, arranged in dialogue with the Veliero bookcase, the Poltrona Luisa, and the room's own severe logic. In the basement, Boccamonte makes its furniture debut with a tribute to Luisa Castiglioni — Albini's protégée, and a figure the exhibition treats not as a footnote but as someone long overdue sustained attention.

Elsewhere: Worn Studios animates the kitchen, Elisa Uberti places concrete forms in the bath with quiet authority, and Atma builds benches from pastel marble offcuts in the corridor. Kiki Goti brings Greek rationalism to the upper rooms; Issé and Sophie Dries hang raw plant fibre from a first-floor ceiling; AtMa Inc fills the garage with joints-exposed seating that wants to be understood rather than merely used; Around the Studio, from Tbilisi, closes the programme with Georgian vernacular materials and a final note of geographic improbability.

Villa Pestarini, to its credit, appears equal to the demands being made of it.