At Work With: Studio Utte

In just three short years, STUDIO UTTE has perfected the time-consuming art of utter simplicity.

The Milan neighborhood surrounding the headquarters of Studio Utte is an exuberant jumble of 20th-century architecture. Just beyond the Central Station, with its fascist-era soaring halls and larger-than-life classical decorations, you’ll find stately art nouveau and neo-Gothic residences standing beside eccentric 1970s apartment blocks built to fill bombed-out lots. Gio Ponti’s green-tiled cubist Palazzo Montedoria is among them. Milan, considered ugly by Italian traditionalists, bears its own kind of splendor: a zany abandon unhindered by heritage and spurred on by the wealth and rapid building needs of the last hundred years.

It’s the context in which Studio Utte was born, and from...