At Palazzo Bovara, a quiet rebellion against digital detachment unfolds through space, matter, and perception.
Corso Venezia 51. Palazzo Bovara is one of those places Milan preserves with quiet discretion: a 19th-century neoclassical residence overlooking the old city walls, whose piano nobile has long hosted salons, conversations, and visions. For the past ten years, during Design Week, Elle Decor Italia has transformed it into its own laboratory on living; a space where editorial content becomes a physical environment to move through.
Crossing the threshold, the first surprise is outdoors. The courtyard welcomes visitors with a series of outdoor lounges that immediately establish a subtle dichotomy: you are inside, protected by the historic walls, enveloped by their architectural gravity and yet also outside, among furnishings designed for open-air living. Antonio Perazzi’s landscape design engages with this ambiguous threshold, turning nature from a backdrop into an active presence. It is a quiet introduction to what follows.
“The project stems from an urgent need to restore centrality to the five senses, now often compressed by a digital mode of consumption that reduces experience to something accelerated, passive, and disconnected from reality.”
Conceived by Piero Lissoni, with Mohd as retail partner and netsuke studio coordinating the exhibition design, Sensory Landscape unfolds as an ecosystem where sound, image, scent, and language merge to guide visitors through an emotional and reflective journey. Lissoni’s vision is grounded in deliberate subtraction: not a lack of means, but precision of intent. What remains is so finely calibrated that it generates what might be called visual silence; a rare quality, almost subversive today.
Thomas Umbaca’s original compositions inhabit the spaces like an invisible presence. Projections by fuse* transform surfaces into dynamic landscapes matter comes alive, walls cease to be boundaries. Giovanna Zucconi’s olfactory intervention constructs a parallel narrative, entrusted not to the eyes but to the nose: scent as language, as involuntary memory. As Merleau-Ponty wrote, the body does not simply occupy space. It lives it. Here, that philosophy becomes architecture.
“The house is our first universe, a cosmos in every sense of the word.” — Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 1957
Perazzi’s botanical project, featuring plants sourced from Italian nurseries and selected for their sensory intensity, runs through the exhibition like a green thread. In Etere, the corridor becomes a meadow.
In Sorgente, the bathroom is transformed into a place of regeneration in its most ancient sense: Bachelard would have recognized in these spaces the ability of a place to return us to ourselves.
In the reading room, a curated selection of books by Feltrinelli Editore accompanies the reflection and at the end of the exhibition, these volumes will be donated to charity, because every good narrative deserves to continue elsewhere.
Sensory Landscape is not a show to be looked at. It is a path to be inhabited slowly; like someone who, after a long time, begins to listen again.
