Sediments

A chocolate factory, founded in the 1920s and active until the 1950s, then abandoned and used for various functions, including a workshop, reopened as a cultural association, coworking, bicycle repair, and, finally, transformed into a hybrid function as a pub/bistro that hosts live shows open to the neighborhood.

Each function has left a memory, metal studs in the ground, several layers of terrazzo floor forming a patchwork of pavements, electrical and hydraulic traces interrupting the homogeneity of the floor settings, structural wooden mezzanines for gaining space, exposed installation systems commensurate, from time to time, with the functional needs.

This place on which we worked has built an identity made of additions, reuses, discoveries, and stratifications that have left continuous traces, like rings in a tree trunk, but without ever completely losing its original spatiality of a large, tall, and bright volume, which characterized the factory.

We then decided to propose an addendum to this sum, trying to put order in the required functions and showing all the scars of the time experienced by this architecture.

Through a light structure, which also reused some of the existing materials, we gave space to the new function: a wooden wall divides the kitchen, and its service spaces, from the serving space; along the border edge, starting from the equipped wall, we can observe the succession of bar counter and its lightbox, a small convivial arena, the director's table, the restaurant benches, the backstage furniture and the stage itself, a general series of furnishings that empties the space and, at the same time, equips it, suggesting the foundations of the use of the place.

"Hug" is the name of this place and in some way the new layout embraces the interior space with warm materials (wood and fibrous insulating panels), which lower the noise threshold, attenuate the peaks, work on the large volume of air enclosed by the walls to make eating, drinking, chatting, and watching a show more comfortable.

They also accentuate the multifunctionality of the place, allowing different co-habitations of the space: the backs of the benches are deep and allow for the positioning of plants, particularly loved by the managers and their green fingers. These can grow by climbing the grates behind which the acoustic panels are fixed, grates that can also be used as equipped walls for small exhibitions that welcome young local artists.

One can sit in different ways, wherever one wants, wherever one feels most comfortable: at the entrance, on seats recovered from an old movie theater; or around a large convivial table, right in front of the kitchen, separated by a transparent filter, to admire the exploits of the chefs; at the counter, or along the shelves facing the large mirrors, for a quick drink, more temporary, but also to observe and to observe oneself; on the small arena, to relate as a group, perhaps to show off; on the benches, among the plants; at the tables with the chairs, all red, recalling the color of the original finishes of the windows and skylights, restored.

The floor is clearly chaotic, as the life of this space has been up to now: a deep sanding has brought out the beauty of the finishing, of those materials that were once cheap and that today seem almost luxurious.

The lamps are minimal, blades of pure illumination, without a body, clinging to the metal grates, hung with invisible cables: everything revolves around a neon still produced in the outskirt of Milan, a neon of those now replaced by LEDs, but which still wants to link the ancient time of the chocolate factory with our contemporaneity, reiterating the name of the place, Hug, and perhaps the concept of space, an embrace in the frenetic Milan.