Dinner party guests at Mario Milana and Gabriella Campagna’s Brooklyn home often end up on the floor. “Not because the furniture is uncomfortable,” notes Milana, who designed most of the pieces in their two-floor townhouse apartment in Clinton Hill. But rather because “there is something convivial about being on the ground,” he explains. “Maybe it’s a tribal thing—sitting in a circle. Evolution brought us too high up.”
Milana, who founded his studio in 2014 after eight years working as a senior designer for Karim Rashid, tends to observe these sorts of social mannerisms when guests are over. He then applies them to his designs, which, despite their decorative look, are driven by functionality. “My inspiration is always how we use things,” he says. He created his Asana chair, a wide, low-slung seat with a cushy backrest, after an uncomfortable few days spent on a meditation retreat in India with his wife. But he found it works just as well for entertaining. So, too, his puffy Tritondo stools, which can be easily moved around the house, and then stacked up to create space. After noticing how people prefer to sit on the sides of a sofa in order to prop up their elbows, he created his Fair Play couch, the back of which is composed of pivoting armrests. “This way, you always get one,” he says.
Milana converted one of the three bedrooms on the garden floor into his office, where he works off a Cassina La Barca table. The brass dePostura desk chair was originally made for Les Ateliers Courbet. “It’s a warm and cozy space,” he says. “Like a bit of a man cave.”
To be able to have people over and interact with the furniture was the main reason the couple moved from their one bedroom in the West Village a year and a half ago. With its high ceilings and exquisitely restored architectural details, the new apartment afforded them an elegant early-20th-century showroom that perfectly complemented Milana’s work. “If you saw Mario’s pieces in a white box, they might look too contemporary,” says Campagna, an actress who plays a role in a new Netflix series from Colombian director Ciro Guerra. “It made sense for us to have a live-work space—an inviting, homey setting where people could actually sit on the pieces.”
Their approach to decorating was purely organic. Aside from an adjustable Matthew Hilton dining table, which Campagna bought when the couple first started dating, the big furniture pieces are all Milana’s designs. Mixed in are meaningful items made from artisans around the world: A pair of stately Indonesian statues that frame the front windows were a gift from Campagna’s aunt. A melted aluminum piece hanging in the living room was made by Milana’s father, Dario, “a side sculptor,” as his son describes him; a gallery of miniature paintings, leading to the expansive, light-filled kitchen, was collected on trips to India, where Campagna lived for three years, studying classical Indian dance and aesthetic theory. Myriad treasures from her time there also fill their Shrine room, which occupies the garden level, along with Milana’s office and the master bedroom. “The space is a combination of earthy pieces and my designs,” he says. “Which is a nice contrast.”
