April 12, 2026For his first project in Milan, London-based Edo Mapelli Mozzi took on one of contemporary design’s most deceptively simple challenges: turning the cold, angular geometry of a modern residential building — in this case, by starchitect Daniel Libeskind — into a warm living environment. His solution? Adopt a “please touch” mantra, outfitting the space with soft curves and hard-to-resist textures. “You want to run your hands along everywhere,” he says.
Mapelli Mozzi started with a mere shell of an apartment, a 5,000-square-foot duplex penthouse atop one of the 13-story towers Liebeskind designed in the CityLife district. “Our client didn’t want the sort of white box that the developer was going to produce in the rest of the units,” he says. “So, we were left just with a concrete double-height space. There was nothing.”
Descended from Italian nobility but born in the UK, Mapelli Mozzi — who married Britain’s Princess Beatrice in 2020 — was drawn to the idea of creating residential properties at a young age. “With divorced parents and moving homes and being sent off to boarding school, I very quickly realized how important home and place making were to your overall attitude, mindset and happiness,” he says.
In 2007, at the age of 23, he founded Banda, whose remit runs the gamut from real-estate transaction and development to interior design. The firm has grown to include a staff of 60, with projects around the globe. Lately, Mapelli Mozzi, its CEO and creative director, has been spending time in the U.S., checking on the progress of residences for clients in New York, Los Angeles, Miami and Puerto Rico.
Banda is also at work on four hospitality projects, including the residences at Rosewood Dubai and guest rooms at London’s forthcoming Waldorf Astoria, which will occupy the 19th-century neoclassical Admiralty Arch building. He’s mum on the details but shares that another London commission — the guest rooms, amenities and food and beverage facilities in an independent hotel set to open in Soho in 2028 — “is going to be a lot of fun creatively, because there are no brand guidelines. They’ve come to us for our aesthetic, and therefore, we’ve got a huge amount of freedom that allows us to put our identity on it.”
For the Milan penthouse, devising a graceful layout was perhaps the biggest hurdle — but also the aspect of his job that is often the most satisfying. “I wake up in the middle of my sleep,” he says with a laugh, “and I’m like, Oh, I’ve got it!”
After drafting multiple iterations, Mapelli Mozzi landed on a floorplan with the principal suite and the spaces for entertaining on the first floor and the guest rooms and study above, where a terrace — one of five — holds a swimming pool and outdoor living and dining areas.
For the interiors, he and his team leaned into natural materials, including wood, marble and limestone, and sought subtle ways to harness light. They positioned the central hallway’s sculptural plaster staircase, for example, so that it would catch the sun’s rays streaming through a glass-paned door to the kitchen.
The clients, a young couple from the fashion world who also spend time at their family vineyard, hoped to evoke a Mediterranean sensibility, Mapelli Mozzi says, “a feeling of serenity, that you’re walking into this softer oasis when you come home from your day in Milan.” Their background in design made them engaged, knowledgeable participants in aesthetic choices, like selecting the various stones the Banda team sourced from nearby quarries.
When it came to the furniture, Mapelli Mozzi followed his general precept that the secret is in the mix. “The vintage items, the antiques, the Brazilian mid-century pieces allow the newer ones to age gracefully alongside them, to breathe,” he says. “If, day one, everything is new, you notice one scratch, one dent. If it’s sitting alongside vintage furniture, you don’t. And so everything can get better with time.”
His favorite pieces in the duplex are the jacaranda-wood chairs with low Viennese-straw backs by venerated Brazilian designer Joaquim Tenreiro that surround a custom Patagonia-marble table in the dining room. “I’ve never found a set in such good condition,” he says of the 10 chairs, which had belonged to a single family since their creation. “The quality was immaculate, and often they can get damaged or chipped.”
The space has walls of fluted plaster, for texture, and finishing touches like a Pablo Picasso drawing, a Japanese-paper tubular pendant light and a 1940s French Art Deco credenza discovered on 1stDibs.
The dining room connects to the cinema room, a cocoon of deep maroon, with wool drapery wrapping around upholstered walls and a supersize sofa-bed hybrid for movie nights. “The idea was they could jump on there with all of their friends,” Mapelli Mozzi says.
Double-height windows give the living room drama, as does a mid-century-inspired custom bookcase in dark oak and aged brass that climbs another wall. A bespoke flax-colored sofa curves in front of the windows, facing a pair of vintage Pierre Jeanneret Easy armchairs.
Even the kitchen is a lesson in tactility. The Banda team employed a half bullnose edge on the Calacatta Monet marble countertops and monumental island, giving them a gently curved lip. (They used the same technique in the bathrooms.)
The large principal suite completes the first floor. The bedroom is a luxuriously minimalist space, its bed sporting a cinnamon-hued custom upholstered headboard and bedspread, with a pair of velvet-cushion-topped stools at its foot. The bathroom connects two terraces, one with an outdoor shower. Inside, micro-cement floors and walls mimic the feel of plaster, green Verde Alpi marble adds earthy color, and a black-clay tub by Studio Loho provides a sculptural focal point. “It’s really organic, soft and lovely to touch,” Mapelli Mozzi says.
Upstairs, the two guest suites were designed with calm in mind. Both feature bespoke beds by Banda with low headboards. One, upholstered in a chalk-colored fabric, has rounded corners and is flanked by travertine nightstands. The other, outfitted in a deep cognac hue, has sharp corners and is teamed with oak nightstands. In the study, a clean-lined desk from the Dutch gallery Morentz aligns with the air of simplicity.
Mapelli Mozzi seems to have had a blast at every stage of the project, whether choosing the perfect slabs of stone or watching a crane hoist furniture up to a penthouse in the middle of Milan. Each task was in the service of finding just the right design language, he explains. “It’s quite ethereal to create emotion.”
