Striking Renaissance, Baroque, and Liberty details meld at Palazzo Donizetti, a 19th-century residence in Milan starring an elliptical staircase accentuated by a wrought-iron balustrade. It was this notable home that Artemest, the online hub for Italian furniture, lighting, home décor, and art, chose to backdrop the 2025 edition of L’Appartamento at Milan Design Week.
Inside, six design practices from around the world reimagined the rooms with handmade goods curated by Artemest. Outside, the curious queued for hours, determined to wander through a spiffed-up building typically shuttered to the public.
“L’Appartamento is completely over the top,” says Ippolita Rostagno, the New York- and Milan-based cofounder and creative director of Artemest. “The idea is to get the most compelling palazzo—usually something falling apart, but never-before-seen—that has a rich history.” Once the venue is secured, Artemest spends a year figuring out its transformation, treating it like an elaborate theater production—from the bespoke pieces down to the floral displays.
For the 2025 edition of L’Appartamento by Artemest in Milan, interior stylist Simone Haag melded frescoes and chandeliers in the foyer
Eclectic is how Rostagno describes the Italian design landscape, but that unexpected dialogue between a centuries-old fresco and lacquered Memphis-era marvel, for example, is precisely what makes it alluring. “It’s so diverse and somehow it all hangs together,” she points out.
Capturing these multitudes can be challenging, but that’s what Rostagno accomplished with L’Appartamento. Just one glance at the ever-changing spaces orchestrated by international talents, and the notion of Italian savoir-faire is crystallized. L’Appartamento’s impact is especially profound because the annual event unfolds in Italy. “It’s the only place to do it,” she says. “Ninety-nine percent of the feeling comes from being there. It’s not just the furniture—it’s the setting and the people who came from having a beautiful lunch.”
Beauty is an integral part of everyday life in Florence, and Rostagno, who was born and raised in the Tuscan hills on the fringes of the city, was constantly exposed to it. “When you grow up in Florence, you absorb that advocacy for the arts is a critical part of humanity and civilization,” she explains.
1508 London designed L’Appartamento’s entertainment room around a series of colorful vignettes
Her mother was a decorative painter, and her father was an experimental theater director, so Rostagno understood the cultural significance of the arts firsthand. She studied sculpture at the Istituto d’Arte, but the school’s location in a Florence neighborhood that teemed with thousands of artisans provided a surprising educational benefit. Day after day, she passed the storefronts of engravers, ceramicists, and woodworkers engaged in the process of making, and “I was so enamored with the theater of it all. They weren’t looking at you, but you were looking at them. Watching people work is mesmerizing. They were making a living on a trade passed down from generation to generation,” she says.
After school, Rostagno moved to the U.S. in 1982, founding an alternative dance company in Los Angeles before heading to New York to translate her technical skills to jewelry design. In 1999, she launched her eponymous jewelry brand at legendary department store Bergdorf Goodman and continues to dream up 18-karat gold and sterling silver collections.
As she plunged deeper into the luxury realm, Rostagno became increasingly alarmed by her observations on visits to Florence. “Every time I went back, there were fewer and fewer artisans, to the point there were none,” she remembers. Distraught over this gradual vanishing of the animated windows she relished peering into some 20 years ago, she decided to act.
During NYC x Design 2025, the Artemest Galleria in New York showcased Nicole Fuller’s 1970s-inspired Incanto exhibition
It wasn’t only the loss of livelihoods that Rostagno was concerned about but the social organization these jobs represented. “When all this collapses, and it’s happening in real time, what happens? For thousands of years, it’s been one way, and now it’s disappearing,” she explains. Yet in the U.S., she was surrounded by wealthy design aficionados, who she knew could help the artisans if only they found each other.
Following fruitless conversations with Italian government officials who didn’t perceive the waning interest in craft as an emergency, Rostagno spent a year and a half poking her head into workshops across Italy. This exploration led to founding Artemest with CEO Marco Credendino in 2015. Through this platform, makers get the spotlight, while Artemest provides their expertise when it comes to marketing and logistical support to reel in a slew of new customers. At first, Rostagno’s vision included food and fashion, but as those areas already had such a vital hold on Americans, she zeroed in on home décor.
The MAWD-designed Artemest penthouse is found on the 85th floor of New York residence the Greenwich by Rafael Viñoly
Today, Artemest is a full-fledged marketplace brimming with 50,000 products from more than 1,000 Italian producers. Shoppers regularly snatch up discoveries like a sleek Leone & Mazzari sideboard, Ludovica and Roberto Palomba’s round coffee table fashioned out of Arabescato Orobico red marble quarried in northern Italy, and Davide Palardi’s triple panel ash mirror.
Early on, Rostagno realized that Artemest particularly resonated with architects and designers. “They look at the site not as a catalog of things but a catalog of possibilities,” she points out. This interest has since spawned Artemest Contract, a resource for the trade navigating large-scale commercial and residential projects. The brand further expanded its presence with Artemest Galleria, a brick-and-mortar space in New York’s West Chelsea neighborhood revamped by local- and Milan-based designer Samuele Brianza in 2023.
Together, these disparate layers of Artemest perpetually champion Italian quality and taste, putting passionate craftspeople back on centerstage. “The mission is to make these artisans busy enough so that they hire young people and the knowledge is transferred,” says Rostagno. “There has to be a vehicle for that knowledge and that vehicle is commerce.”
Meyer Davis designed the Grand Salon for L’Appartamento, where a frescoed ceiling complements sculptural lighting
A marble work in progress from featured Artemest design brand MMOOS
Lorenza Bozzoli’s curved sofas for Fratelli Boffi pair with a Badari chandelier and Maria Vittoria Paggini coffee table at Incanto
This article originally appeared in HD’s November 2025 issue.
