Fine Mondo
A 21-year studio built by two partners for an invite-only clientele — founded in Milan in 2004, operating today across four cities, and still led, drawn, and detailed by the same hand.
The Principals
Photograph in studio · MMXXIV
Trained at the Politecnico di Milano and formerly with Studio Peregalli, Elena leads the architectural and heritage-restoration practice across the studio's European commissions. She personally oversees every drawing set issued under her name.
Photograph in studio · MMXXIV
Read architecture at the AA School and led material research for a Mayfair atelier before co-founding the studio. Marcus directs the in-house Material Library and personally curates the specification of every commission.
Working Philosophy
We were taught, in the studios we came up in, that a house is the sum of a thousand unobserved decisions — the weight of a door handle, the reveal on a stone architrave, the silence of a corridor at six in the evening. Those decisions cannot be subcontracted. They must travel together, from the first conversation about a site to the moment a client pours a glass of wine in the room we have built for them.
For that reason, Fine Mondo is organised against the prevailing fashion. There is no creative director and no account handler. Each commission is held, end to end, by a single partner who answers the telephone, signs the drawings, and walks the floor on installation day. Our atelier of forty-seven craftsmen works beneath the same roof as our architects. Nothing is franchised.
The result is a slower, quieter method — and, we believe, the only one capable of producing a house a family will not tire of.
— E.V. & M.H., Milano, Spring 2024
The Method
Every commission passes through the same five working chapters. The names change with the house; the order does not.
A six-to-ten-week listening period, conducted on site where possible, during which the partner-of-record records the family's rituals, the building's lineage, and the constraints — listed, not invented — that the project must respect.
A single folio of drawings and material studies, drawn by hand and presented in person. No mood-boards, no reference imagery drawn from other people's houses; the concept belongs to the site alone.
A complete, partner-signed drawing and specification package issued under one cover. Every stone, every hinge, every ironmongery item is listed by maker and catalogue number before a contractor is invited to price.
Bespoke elements — joinery, stone, bronze, plaster, textiles — are fabricated in our own workshops in Lombardy and London. Our master craftsmen work to drawings issued by the architect of record; nothing is lost in translation.
The partner-of-record remains on site for the full installation period, attending to the final positioning of every object, every rug, every work of art — including those owned by the client prior to our involvement.
In numbers
Request a Private Consultation“A house worth living in for thirty years cannot be designed in a hurry, and it cannot be designed by committee. It must be drawn by the same hand that watches it being built.”