Piero Portaluppi's 1930s Milan Bathrooms Are Design's New Status Symbol

The gray-and-white "spa bathroom" is losing its grip on interior design, and Piero Portaluppi is taking its place. The Rationalist architect, who died in 1967, built his most famous Milan houses in the 1930s — and their bathrooms, not their sweeping staircases, are now the reference point for designers from Athena Calderone to Gregory Rockwell.

The new look swaps Calacatta Viola marble and floodlit white for dramatically veined stone in dark green or dusky red, Art Deco-style fixtures and rich woodwork. The model is 1930s Milan, where Portaluppi and his peers turned utilitarian rooms into showpieces through bold material pairings and precise geometry.

Who was Portaluppi, and why the bathrooms?

Portaluppi (1888-1967) designed Villa Necchi Campiglio and Casa Corbellini-Wassermann, two of Milan's most photographed residences. At Villa Necchi, mirrored walls multiply the swirling patterns of Arabescato Orobico marble. At Casa Corbellini-Wassermann, he set vibrant green Verde Challant marble against graphic black stonework.

"He frequently used contrasting materials to frame hallways, thresholds, and architectural elements, allowing these moments of juxtaposition to draw the eye and bring a sense of ceremony to the space," Calderone said. She visited Villa Necchi with architect Danielle Siggerud while reimagining her own Tribeca apartment.

What does this change for actual bathrooms?

AD100 designer Gregory Rockwell answers with his own work. For the primary bathroom of supermodel Paloma Elsesser's Brooklyn townhouse, Rockwell and colleague Hester Hodde layered burgundy Rosso Francia marble, walnut-and-mirror paneling and pistachio-green walls.

"It's a slightly strange combination when you think about it, but I love the colors together," Rockwell said. His broader case for the period: "What I love about Portaluppi is how controlled everything is architecturally, but then he'll do something extravagant with the marble or an unexpected color."

Calderone took a different lesson. For her primary bathroom she edged pale stone with intricate inlaid tile borders, added Art Deco-inflected fixtures and geometric mirrors, and set a deeply veined Verde Alpi marble pedestal sink in her powder room. Portaluppi, she notes, "embraced the irregularity and variation in the veining" — at odds with today's ideal of perfectly bookmatched slabs.

Milan-based Giampiero Tagliaferri put a Verde Alpi pedestal sink in the powder room of a pied-à-terre he designed for a young art collector. "Reinterpretation is about extracting a period's core DNA, not literal replication," he said.

Can you get the look without a renovation?

Manufacturers have already scaled the trend down to retail:

• Artistic Tile's Calacatta Gold marble mosaic echoes Calderone's inlaid borders
• Kelly Wearstler's oxblood Treillage tile for Ann Sacks translates Elsesser's burgundy tones
• Clé Tile's Reath Design marbleized patterns evoke natural stone movement
• Charles Edwards's alabaster dish light carries an Art Deco silhouette
• Crate & Barrel sells a Verde Green marble soap pump and tissue holder at countertop scale

The caveat: a tiled accent or a marble soap dish is a gesture, not a Portaluppi room. The full effect still requires cladding walls in stone, as Calderone is quick to stress — smaller, individually composed pieces were his ingenuity.

Rockwell's closing argument holds either way: "I've never really understood why bathrooms should be any less interesting than the rest of the house. They might as well be beautiful and exciting."