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Florence and Venice have the beauty, Rome has the politics and the media, but Milan is where you go in Italy to do international business.
Italy's financial capital and the global centre of fashion and design, Milan has been building serious momentum for over a decade — accelerated by Expo 2015, a new business district, metro extensions, and the 2026 Winter Olympics.
The city is unmistakably Italian, but its outlook is international: more connected, more dynamic, and increasingly attractive to the global businesses, investors and families that other Italian cities simply don't compete for.
Our job, working with BNP Paribas and Investire across four projects, was to tell that story to international investors who too quickly defaulted to old Italian stereotypes — and to show them that the opportunity in Milan's commercial and residential real estate market was both real and urgent.
Our Milan portfolio spans commercial repositioning, luxury residential and retail leasing — four projects, each requiring a different argument for the same underlying city. Garage Traversi, for BNP Paribas, was Milan's equivalent of Battersea Power Station: an architectural icon that had faded and sat long underused. We repositioned it as a core address within Milan's fashion triangle, anchoring the strategy to its proximity to the Quadrilatero della Moda. A flagship party at Salone del Mobile and a programme of artist collaborations put Traversi back on the luxury retail radar; it was subsequently sold to Invesco and is now home to Louis Vuitton's flagship experiential store.
On the retail leasing side, Dante XII required marketing materials persuasive enough to convince Calvin Klein's decision-makers in New York to take space on a newly pedestrianised street — then considered off-pitch. Our residential work included Dante Rovello, luxury apartments in the heart of Milan's old city, and Nizzoli8, the most complex brief of the four. Nizzoli8 is a sustainable reimagining of a postmodern icon, with 2,600sqm of private landscaped garden — genuinely rare in central Milan — alongside penthouses, apartments and full wellness facilities. Positioning it required us to align messaging across investors, asset managers, architects and agents simultaneously, calibrating what the building meant to a Milanese buyer versus an international one.
The results across the portfolio reflect the strength of the underlying strategy. Traversi was successfully sold to Invesco and has attracted Louis Vuitton as its anchor tenant. Dante XII is now home to Calvin Klein Jeans and Inter Milan's brand store — two internationally recognisable names on a street that needed exactly that kind of credibility. Nizzoli 8, with its launch campaign running from Q1 2024 and the building completing in Autumn 2025, has seen a significant share of apartments sold off-plan — a key metric for the developer's business model and a clear signal that the positioning landed. Our advantage in Milan is, in part, that we are not from Italy. That distance lets us see clearly what makes the city attractive to international eyes, while respecting and retaining the Italian values, craft and character that make these places — when they're done well — probably the best in the world.
