Stylish and cool POTAFIORI flower shop has good music and why not, good food

Architects: Storage Associati
Location: Milan, Italy
Year: 2016
Photo courtesy: Paola Pansini
Description:

“In the heart of Milan’s Bocconi University district, opened the bistro POTAFIORI flowers. POTAFIORI is a vision of Rosalba Piccinni, singer and florist who owns three shops in Milan and Bergamo. Over the years she developed the passion to welcome customers by transforming the time of the preparation of a bouquet in a moment to savor good music and why not, good food. “Bistrot flowers”, a new way of being together.

A flower shop with a kitchen, a familiar atmosphere, open 7 days a week from 8 to 24. You can go there in the morning for a coffee or lunch, admiring the work of seasonal flowers mixed with rope, wire, bark, then find yourself in the evening, still there in front of a good glass of wine while Rosalba singing solo takes you away with her music.

The project was led by storageassociati, architectural firm based in Milan, which has with Rosalba a long term friendship… “she’s always been the florist to trust whenever you like to please someone with a special floral present“. Storage was asked to design the space and she gave the architects carte blanche to interpretate this new world of flowers&food.

The original beauty of the site was completely hidden behind internal partitions and fragmented spaces. The first thought was to open up the space giving new light to the original structure of the early XXth century building.

The aim was to follow the flow of neat geometric forms, the loud voice of raw materials, all wrapped in a natural and soft light during the day and on through the night.

A dark and mellow casing, in which intersections of volumes in Ceppo Lombardo and black Iron burst into the space. Partitions of rough Placocem are inserted between the pre-existing arches, closing up the technical volume of the kitchen and leading to the lower floor.

The imperfections of raw materials are explicitly preserved. The stone’s dug surface and the vertical panels of Placocem marked by serial production codes are purposely exposed not to conceal the story of these elements, here juxtaposed with the elegance of the smooth skin of the metals, Iron and Brass.”