“Each year, we complete four to five projects. A seasonal rhythm, attuned to nature, that allows us to work with responsibility – giving every project the time it needs for the right decisions to emerge”
The studio
Spaces tell stories, remember, reveal.
In the heart of Milan, within a former furniture warehouse, Garibaldi Architects Studio was founded in 2007. A profound sense of calm permeates the space; light descends from above and diffuses softly. An industrial yet contemporary atmosphere carries traces of an ancient, unhurried, and deeply rooted time — along with everything time itself preserves: culture, memory, attentiveness.
More than a studio, it is an architectural atelier. Within this relaxed atmosphere, surrounded by the greenery of growing plants, Alessia Garibaldi — architect and designer — and her team of collaborators cultivate an authentic dialogue between architecture and interior design, between Italian rationalist aesthetics and an international vision. These design trajectories shape a language devoted to endurance, conceived to withstand the passage of time.
Nearly two decades of high-level commissions, spanning both Heritage and Contemporary projects, have mapped an atlas that connects Europe, Africa, India, and China. Diverse horizons, diverse projects — from private residences to hotels, headquarters, retail spaces, and yachts — yet driven by a single aspiration: to create places where people can live well, grow, flourish, and meet within the richness of their emotions and ideas.
Places where light, nature, and art breathe with serenity. Places born from a strong idea — so strong it conveys respect and delicacy.
“In Italy, we can imagine everything—and bring it to the world. A heritage of history, elegance, and exceptional materials, stretching from Brianza to Venice, enables us to craft even the smallest detail entirely to measure”
Creative Direction
The first gesture is a watercolour brushstroke. Swift, instinctive, transparent — an instant that translates onto paper a colour, an emotion, an intuition.
For Alessia Garibaldi, design is an act of remembering and imagining: two ends of the same temporal line, connecting years of education and long experience, cultivated taste, and a profound, attentive listening to places and their beauty. From this continuum emerge spaces and furnishings conceived as truly bespoke.
Past and future enter dialogue. What encourages this encounter is a constant way of being an architect — where architecture, in its most authentic form, is every day and light, because it quietly shelters life; yet strong and complex, as a privileged interpreter of its time.
Each project by Alessia Garibaldi therefore contains multiple projects, multiple perspectives: a polyphony of spaces, a poetic tension toward art, historical inquiry, and a refined exploration of materials and skilled craftsmanship.
At the origin of everything, the keystone, lies listening to the client — open, sincere, and participatory — so that every decision, even the smallest detail, responds not only to the client’s reasons, but also to the dreams, desires, sensations, and memories that gave rise to the project.
A matter of generosity and balance: offering the best of oneself so that others may fully rediscover themselves.
“Great projects begin with a strong idea. For this reason, the architect must take responsibility – making decisions and shaping space with meaning. Excessive flexibility leads to confusion, uncertainty, and ultimately, monotony”
Design Philosophy
At the heart of Italian architectural wisdom lies the creation of spaces and furnishings capable of expressing a single, harmonious idea — while interpreting the past through a contemporary lens. Drawing upon the measure and aesthetics of the great Milanese masters, Alessia Garibaldi enhances the formal complexity of each project through a carefully calibrated symmetry between volumetric orders, natural materials, and bespoke details.
The primary material of such an articulated vision is time. Time is required to absorb and refine every decision: from materials — which are themselves narratives, portraits of the place from which each project originates — to the design of individual furnishings, and finally to their realization, entrusted to the finest Italian artisans in Brianza and Venice.
It is only through this stratification of time, culture, technique, and poetry that spaces acquire their most precious value: meaning. To possess meaning is to embrace both reason and emotion; it is to take the client by the hand and accompany them on a wondrous journey through the treasures of nature and art.
Sometimes it is a block of marble, whose unveiling determines the rhythm of space. At other times, it is a fabric — that one, and no other. And if, during the process, a material changes, everything else must change accordingly, so that the elegance of the project, its uniqueness, its voice, remain intact.
“From East to West, every place deserves its own project – one that lives in harmony with its history, its energies, and the materials that define it and make it unique. It is roots that give trees their stability”
Places
Only in a country as extraordinary as Italy is it possible to love two places that stand as opposites, and to feel deeply rooted in both.
Alessia Garibaldi was born and raised in Milan and chose Venice as her city of election. An antithesis: hardness and the unstoppable invention of light; rigor and lightness; intensity and contemplation.
Milan and Venice also embody two extraordinary architectural schools. In Milan: Giuseppe Terragni, Piero Portaluppi, Luigi Caccia Dominioni, Giovanni Muzio. In Venice — emblem of the union between the arts — Carlo Scarpa. These are the masters through whom Alessia Garibaldi shaped her sensibility, consciously setting aside her own generation to return instead to the roots of Rationalism.
In Milan, the gaze moves through the rooms of Villa Necchi Campiglio — a perfect relationship between space, function, and aesthetics — then lingers on the façade of Ca’Brutta, and rises once more toward the Pirelli Tower, to study the collaboration between Gio Ponti and Pier Luigi Nervi.
Venice, meanwhile, sets the agenda of the contemporary: the Biennales, encounters with artists, curators, and collectors. An open, stimulating salon that, in Alessia Garibaldi’s world — in Venice as in Milan — becomes a true living room: a warm place of culture, exchange, and friendship, where the protagonists of contemporary creativity come together.
“Where a project responds to an authentic human need, beautiful architecture emerges. To speak of the human is to speak of drawing—of a hand that translates emotion. Technology is necessary, but it comes after”
Projects and Collaborations
The beauty of a gesture arises from care. Seemingly natural, it is in fact the result of study, focus, and deliberate choice. Alessia Garibaldi has therefore chosen to take on only a few projects each year, so that every client may receive the utmost attention and every architect in her team may contribute with freshness and responsibility.
This method seeks excellence even in collaboration with the most authoritative partners, such as the engineering firm EBA, a guarantor of an integrated — distinctly Italian — vision that bridges architecture and technology. Over the years, clients have responded enthusiastically to this tailored and rigorous approach, adaptable across different geographies and commissions.
In Alessia Garibaldi’s portfolio are villas in Accra, Ghana, a tribute to Mies van der Rohe; Pune, India; Shenzhen, China; and the Surrey countryside, a reinterpretation of an early twentieth-century mansion where Victorian style meets contemporary design. Hospitality projects include Fonteverde Resort & Spa in Tuscany and Palazzo Velabro in Rome, while retail highlights feature a long-standing collaboration with Giada — from Shanghai to Via Montenapoleone — and Leica stores across Europe. On Lake Como, a fleeting glimpse of a trail is enough to begin the day for a Sanlorenzo yacht, meticulously crafted in every detail.
