Quintessenza at Casa Ornella: recounting the Mediterranean with ceramics, light and colour
During Design Week 2025, Casa Ornella – the designer and art director Maria Vittoria Paggini’s apartment in Milan – opens to the public with a new exhibition entitled Mediterranea – Andamento Lento. This project celebrates design as a fluid, sensory experience that shifts between light, natural materials and colour. And in this vibrant and intimate narrative, Quintessenza ceramics play a leading role.
Casa Ornella is not just a home. It is a moving organism, a constantly changing, permanent display space, designed to inspire and create connections between brands, professionals and visitors. Here, every room is carefully created to surprise, overturn the traditional logic of home décor and showcase a new way of living. In this vision, the kitchen and bathroom become central focus points for everyday rituals where ceramics acquire a narrative value.
Straightaway, inside the front door, there is a small but potent feature that greets the visitor. A water rite in which a Gio Ponti washbasin with Mamoli taps, combines with Quintessenza ceramics in a clear tribute to the style of Moroccan riads and the meditative dimension of spa rituals. To recreate this evocative atmosphere, Färgblock gloss, Färgblock matt and Cirkel tiles, in ocean black and white, appear in a refined balance between memory and contemporary style that runs throughout the project.
In the area that leads to the night zone, the Quintessenza Fluid brick tile collection offers velvety, textured surfaces that blend with the warm nuances of Ting Paint to generate an inviting, immersive environment. The Romeo bed, designed by Paggini for Softhouse, is the visual focus of this space and helps to build a mood of sensory comfort.
In the Sala Convivio, the apartment’s beating heart, a wardrobe designed by Paggini is decorated with Quintessenza Färgblock ceramics, designed by Tekla Severin. These tiles build vibrant, geometrical colour blocks which add depth and rhythm to this convivial room. The same collection is also used for the balcony, which extends the visitor experience outside in a lively exchange between the interiors and the urban landscape.
In the Mediterranean-style kitchen, the Quintessenza Colors collection takes centre stage with its blue.03, white.01 and black.04 tiles creating a bright, textured atmosphere in harmony with the other natural materials in the room. The collection returns in the bathroom, where a dark.iridescent finish generates a sophisticated, contemporary, iridescent effect that redefines the beauty of everyday spaces.
To complete the experience, Quintessenza presents Marea, a collection that adds an extra visual dimension to the project. In its gold and emerald-green variant, the Bassa-Marea collection offers surfaces with an undulating texture, inspired by the slow and hypnotic motion of waves. The effect is refined, sophisticated and perfect for creating a decorative bathroom wall that embellishes this environment with timeless character.
Quintessenza at Casa Ornella is much more than a display space. It is a declaration of style and vision, a continuous interaction of design, function and poetry, in which ceramics become the language and life force of contemporary living.
