How a Monochromatic Milan Apartment Was Transformed With Color and Pattern

It all started with the wallpaper.

After an architect performed a full-scale overhaul of their apartment, a Milanese couple decided the home still lacked texture. “She was very good with the restructuring and renovation, but very austere in her colors,” explains one of the homeowners, a 48-year-old marketing executive who shares the apartment with her 55-year-old financier husband and their two daughters, ages 5 and 7. (The family has asked to remain anonymous.) “After three months, I felt the need for color and inspiration,” she says. 

“We wanted color, but we needed guidance,” the client says. “Ilaria showed us how to balance everything.” 

But finding that equilibrium took time. “They were hesitant at the beginning to embrace so many colors and patterns. It’s not a very Italian thing to do,” says Ferraro, 42, who almost 10 years ago founded Ted Suite—a hybrid interior-design, event-production, and public-relations studio—in a 1936 rationalist villa attributed to Gio Ponti. A popular venue during the city’s annual design festival, Salone del Mobile, the space showcases Ferraro’s particular design ethos, which blends floral prints, plush fabrics, and quiet formality. 

“The apartment needed more soul, more reflection of their personalities,” she adds. 

What started as a relatively modest project to update the living room eventually expanded to the entire five-bedroom, 4,200-square-foot home. Set in a prestigious 1920s building in the city’s tony Corso Venezia neighborhood, the apartment features 12-foot ceilings—many with intricate moldings—and original parquet and marble floors. 

Ferraro’s initial work led to a two-year process that would ultimately change 80 percent of the home’s decor, imparting the warm, elegant style the owners desired and leading to a deep working relationship. 

“I’d always been told I had good taste. And I’ve always been interested in fashion, but through Ilaria, I discovered that I loved researching interior design,” says the client, who spent many late nights during Milan’s long pandemic quarantine scouring the website of Paris-based antiques market Marché Biron. “Ilaria was so reassuring with my research. She helped us in incorporating dramatic pieces, in contextualizing them in our home. It became a completely different place.” 

Room by room, Ferraro helped the clients choose and place refined textiles, vintageVintageVintage refers to the specific year a wine's grapes were harvested, with exceptional vintages reflecting particularly favorable growing season conditions within a given region and year. Serious collectors track vintageGo to Vintage Glossary furniture pieces, and the Chinese artwork and objets they’d been collecting for several years, many of them purchased from Milanese dealer Mario Consolo. Ferraro, an expert in textile historarchival silks, velvets, and linens that make the apartment’s furniture, window treatments, and walls feel so sumptuous. 

“Every lampshade was a reflection of research that the clients and I did together. It was a real collaboration. They are passionate about vintageVintageVintage refers to the specific year a wine's grapes were harvested, with exceptional vintages reflecting particularly favorable growing season conditions within a given region and year. Serious collectors track vintageGo to Vintage Glossary design, French Deco, and chinoiserie, as am I,” Ferraro says. “It really evolved over time, like doing a puzzle. Every piece we found led to 10 others. On the level of textiles, this is one of the best projects I’ve ever done.” 

The couple’s design education extended far beyond fabric. They spent months evaluating the best paint color for the entrance, ultimately choosing Farrow & Ball’s bold Radicchio, a rich crimson that Ferraro says evokes a museum or gallery setting. The designer’s penchant for mixing luxurious fibers and elegant palettes also inspired her to create two custom rugs. In the entrance, a circular hand-knotted silk and fine-wool design sits beneath a vintageVintageVintage refers to the specific year a wine's grapes were harvested, with exceptional vintages reflecting particularly favorable growing season conditions within a given region and year. Serious collectors track vintageGo to Vintage Glossary French marble and bronze table, acting as a kind of light-pink punctuation mark to the somber gray-and-white checkerboard marble floor. Another, inspired by lily ponds, anchors the 1970s sofas in front of the living-room fireplace. 

There’s a range of time periods and styles on display. The wife’s love of Art Deco and vintageVintageVintage refers to the specific year a wine's grapes were harvested, with exceptional vintages reflecting particularly favorable growing season conditions within a given region and year. Serious collectors track vintageGo to Vintage Glossary pieces led her to a bronze palm-tree lamp from Parisian dealer Caroline Margeridon. Placed in front of the dining room’s de Gournay paper, it creates a cheeky trompe l’oeil effect. “We were very inspired by the paper and by the 1930s,” Ferraro says. 

In the sitting room, Ferraro designed sofas in Pierre Frey’s Opio bouclé upholstery. “We did a lot of sitting on them, testing the proportions and measurements,” she says. The walls feature the couple’s collection of Chinese paintings and prints, including a series of Chinese dignitaries from 1850. Throughout, botanical references repeat in the wallpaper, the furnishings, and the wall sconces. 

In the living room, de Gournay’s St. Laurent paper, festooned with peacocks, peonies, and camellias, provides a lush background. To complement it, the couple found a 1970s coffee table with a base shaped like a bonsai tree online; its oval top is echoed by the French mirror, circa 1800, on the wall above. 

But Ferraro also kept some of the modern and contemporary details from renovation, particularly in the primary bedroom, where a Leslie Adelman Branching Bubble chandelier hangs over the bed and a Venini vase decorates the mantel. 

As refined as the spaces are, Ferraro and her clients say, they also promote a feeling of ease. Asked which areas of the apartment are their favorite, the husband chooses the bow window in the dining room, which features a seat upholstered in Colony’s botanical Marly fabric, cushions in Pierre Frey’s Braquenié print, and silk curtains. His wife selects the bow window in the primary bedroom, with its layered Pierre Frey archival Fadini-Borghi jacquard fabrics and silk-linen drapes. 

To keep their children happy and their textiles pristine, the couple converted a bedroom into a playroom, creating an easy space where friends and crayons can mix freely. 

“We are fortunate that our daughters are very well-behaved,” says the client. “We told them they have their playroom, and they can do whatever they want there, but not in the rest of the apartment. When they’re big, they’ll appreciate all these beautiful things.” 

This November, the family will mark four years in the apartment, and they’re still savoring Ferraro’s distinctive interiors. 

“The stupendous thing is that I feel I’ve only been here four months, not four years. It’s always a pleasure to come home,” says the owner. “It’s incredible—it always feels new.” 

This article originally appeared in Robb Report US.