Box of Colour: Casa Alkymia, a Monteverde Apartment by Punto Zero.

Rome studio Punto Zero has a habit of treating colour as architecture rather than decoration, and Casa Alkymia—a 230-square-metre apartment in the leafy Monteverde Vecchio quarter—is the studio’s latest confident outing. Set inside a 1930s palazzetto, the renovation takes its cues from the building’s rationalist bones: the arched façade, the soft curves, the early-twentieth-century logic the studio was determined to work with rather than against.

“We reinterpreted the arches of the exterior façade and the rationalist curved forms as recognisable elements within our project,” explain the architects, studio founders Arianna Nobile and Giorgio Marchese.

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Giorgio Marchese, founding director of Punto Zero's own home is located in Rome’s Oppian Hill, in a building dating back to 1900’s.

Rather than chase open-plan orthodoxy, Punto Zero reworked the layout around the apartment’s young owner and his family, carving a large structural opening between kitchen and living to loosen circulation and pull light deep into the plan. “And to bring the terrace space ‘inside the home’,” adds Nobile. A sculpted plasterboard counter-wall—all arches, recesses and curves—quietly choreographs the windowed walls and that new opening into a single composition. “This solution allowed us to visually recede the pre-existing windows, so that their varying proportions could coherently fit within a harmonious composition inspired by the language of early twentieth-century architecture,” says Marchese.

Then there’s the colour, which is where Casa Alkymia really sings. Working with colour consultant Blu di Prussia, the team assigned each room its own emotional register: powder pink wraps the kitchen walls and ceiling, while a saturated carmine—paired with black terrazzo—carves out the master suite. “In this way, we created a sort of red box within a pale green box,” says Marchese, describing a spatial hierarchy borrowed from old-world suites. In the children’s room, blue-toned ceilings bring the lofty proportions down to a more intimate scale.

Terrazzo does the connective work throughout—fine anthracite grain at the entry giving way to a coarser, more colourful aggregate in the living room, the transitions traced by brass inlays that run straight through doorways and swoop into curves along the corridors.

Furnished with a mix of design heavyweights—a Cassina Bramante sideboard, a Warren Platner for Knoll armchair, a Gino Sarfatti pendant and a Renato Guttuso lithograph among them—Casa Alkymia is a study in letting old architecture and bold colour meet halfway.

The Corridor is the Star at Atelierzero's Milan Apartment Renovation.

Atelierzero has transformed a fragmented 155sqm Milan apartment into a fluid, open domestic landscape—two connected units unified by bold colour, natural materials, and a portico-inspired corridor that functions as the home's central axis.

[Images courtesy of Punto Zero. Colour consultant: Blu di Prussia. Styling by Alessandra Orzali. Photography by Eller Studio / Serena Eller Vainicher.]