A Rainbow Thread (Mix Interiors)
Marijana Radovic and Marco Bonelli on trees, triangles and the fact the only red thread running through their work is that there isn’t one.
Partners in both life and work, Marijana Radovic and Marco Bonelli met through colleagues and started dating, their personal lives entwining first. “My father always warned me, ‘Marco, never mix love and business!’,” Bonelli laughs, speaking with Radovic from their studio in Milan. However, with architectural practices just a 10-minute walk from each other, as well as aligned values and approaches, it wasn’t long before they started collaborating and their professional lives began overlapping too.
“The work partnership emerged slowly and spontaneously, and eventually just made sense,” he says. Knowing they had a similar work ethic helped. “Marco invited me for dinner and I was running late,” says Radovic. “Someone who is not an architect or designer might not understand how you can lose 20 hours to something that ultimately comes to nothing, but we quickly saw that we had the same commitment to our work.” In 2011, their joint architecture and design studio, m2atelier, was born.
Serbian-born Radovic started designing at just 13 when her father commissioned furniture she had designed for the bedroom she shared with her sister and encouraged her, not only to choose the paint colours, but to paint the walls herself. “We all need the trust of the people around us,” she says. She went on to design spaces for friends and family and, somewhat inevitably, study architecture at University of Belgrade – a course that included interior and furniture design. An interest in the ingenuity of highly functional small spaces led to a master's degree in yacht design at the Milan Polytechnic. “The organisation of space and how it allows you to organise your life is the foundation of everything,” she says. She lived and worked in Rome, Athens and London before eventually settling in Milan.
Italian-born Bonelli didn’t start quite so young, studying classical Greek, Latin and philosophy at school. “My father was a lawyer and not quite so trusting,” he laughs. But the spark of inspiration to which he credits his career did happen when he was just six-years-old. Despite neither parent having a creative career (his mother was a biological scientist), they immersed Bonelli and his brother in culture, art and museums. “Being raised in Genoa, we were surrounded by history, but my parents were keen to show us modern art and architecture.” The pivotal moment came when his father showed the young Bonelli how Piet Mondrian’s work had evolved from early landscapes that included figurative trees to abstract work that saw trees rendered as triangles. “That was a game changer for me,” he says.
“I always remember being fascinated by how you can translate and symbolise. Even my classical studies were about interpretation – humanistic, interpreted reality. And I’m still interested in transformations of shapes in architecture and volumes, so perhaps that’s where it all started.” Bonelli studied at the Architecture University of Genoa, worked for Philippe Starck in Paris and Ricardo Bofill in Barcelona before moving to New York for a master’s at Columbia University, where he stayed for 10 years before coming to Milan.
“We don't believe that opposites attract,” he says, removing his reading glasses to make the point. “The more similar you are, the better.” But, of course, there are differences that make their pairing work. Bonelli credits Radovic with being a better multitasker and faster decision maker, whereas he enjoys casting doubt. “When you question a decision, it gains quality,” she admits, her hands drawing flowing shapes in the air as she speaks. “You might change or you might not, but either way, the idea becomes stronger.” They also butt heads over the orientation of any given design element. “You can bet whenever I have chosen horizontal, she’ll say vertical or vice versa,” adds Bonelli, “I don’t know what it is, and we can never second guess each other, but we always say the opposite!”
Despite these minor disputes, they have pulled together over 15 years to produce an impressive array of projects from the Maria Man fashion boutique in Croatia to a private residence in Norway, from a €54 million yacht to sculptural, couture-inspired furniture pieces in collaboration with Italian legacy brand Giorgetti. Next up is Ora by Casa Tua — a ‘Greek Island’ inside a Miami skyscraper complete with bars, restaurants and residential apartments, and perhaps less predictably, a full scale woodland with mature trees, that replaces three floors halfway up the tower and is completely open to the elements.
Slightly less fantastical but no less impressive, their latest project is CORE, a private members' club on New York’s Fifth Avenue that is set within the 1927 former headquarters of iconic American companies such as Coca-Cola, NBC and Columbia Pictures. “It’s very Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” says Bonelli, referencing Audrey Hepburn’s 1961 film. “You can close your eyes and imagine yourself back in that era, but we wanted to do something different.” The major architectural moves were connecting the third and fourth floors with an interior staircase, “like a Palazzo”, and going up into the attic to create a restaurant surrounded by a 4,000 sq ft terrace, making use of space that would have otherwise been redundant. While the exterior remains true to the building’s heritage, the interior reflects one of m2atelier’s key principles: ‘less is enough.’
“Such an envelope makes what’s inside even more precious,” says Bonelli. “It's like a treasure box that holds a surprise.” The surprise is a quiet elegance that belies how functional it is. “You can spend 24 hours there, in different spaces, in different ways,” says Radovic. “So it is very important that the whole path, from an early morning sports session to a productive work meeting to an enjoyable evening meal, is catered for.” She often talks about their projects feeling both ‘calm and alive,’ and explains that the calm part is about everything working. It’s their ‘less is enough’ approach that sees them take more away from schemes than they add in; discerning what is absolutely essential. From acoustics to traffic flow, a lot of their thinking results in ‘silent design’ that you’ll never notice in photographs, only in how you experience their spaces firsthand. Or it might be a sense of proportion and balance in the visual design that means a scheme just ‘works’ in a way that a lay person could never quite put their finger on. “When you start working on an architectural project, you want everything to be aligned and perfect, but once you're happy with everything, you have to disturb it a little bit,” says Radovic. “You have to give it life.” The ‘alive’ part comes from the imperfection of craft, the texture of natural materials or the way natural light moves around a space throughout the day. “It's a very tiny layer, but the alive part is always important for us.”
m2atelier’s final guiding principle is ‘sustainable minimalism’ and, again, this is often unseen. “It's not just about using recycled materials; it’s the process of thinking through the future lives of every project,” explains Radovic. “We want to simplify everything, from using fewer materials to thinking about heating and cooling, considering the generations to come. How can we future-proof for the next refit or rebuild? And we are lucky to have visionary clients already moving in this direction.” Bonelli thinks the definition of luxury is changing; moving away from opulence and rare materials towards a quieter definition. “We like to whisper things and we often talk about the silence of design – you can be silent without being mute.”
We explore the idea of a ‘red thread’ running through their work. “The only ‘fil rouge’ is that we do something different every time!”, laughs Bonelli, and this applies to their individual career paths, which take in multiple countries, languages and design disciplines, as well as to their studio, which is built around an extensive material library. “We refer to m2atelier as a ‘bespoke atelier’ even though, at 45 people, we are a little bigger than that might imply,” says Radovic. That’s because, as well as being very handson and materials-driven, with a structure that encourages cross-disciplinary collaboration, every space they design is bespoke to the culture, the climate and the client behind its brief. “We might show four ideas to one client and they’ll choose one,” explains Bonelli. “But we would never show the ideas not selected by one client to another. It might not be the most efficient business model, but there’s no copy and paste – everything is bespoke.” As they talk, I envisage a thread that is not just red, but made up of all the colours of the rainbow, tying together their diverse practice.
When I ask them about the future, although Bonelli jokes about designing the next Guggenheim, he says what really lights them both up is people. “What makes our world interesting is the beautiful people we are exposed to,” he explains. “If I could make any wish for the future, it would be that it brings more interesting people to our table.” And although the term ‘red thread’ has come to mean a central, unifying theme or idea that runs through a body of work, it actually comes from a Chinese proverb that suggests an invisible red thread connecting those who are destined to meet regardless of time, place or circumstance. So perhaps that’s their ‘fil rouge’: the fact they met each other despite every chance neither of them would end up in Milan, and the people they are destined to meet and work with in the future; regardless of time, place or circumstance.
All copy is reproduced here as it was supplied by Katie Treggiden to the client or publication.
Katie Treggiden is a craft, design and sustainability writer, a nature facilitator and the author of Broken: Mending and Repair in a Throwaway World (Ludion, 2023).
