No Place Like HOME

As one half of storied design duo STUDIO PEREGALLI SARTORI, LAURA SARTORI RIMINI is used to enacting the EXACTING VISIONS of her famous clientele. But when it comes to her own HOMES, like this multigenerational CHESA in the Swiss Alps, COMFORT and CHARACTER reign supreme.

- Story by LAUREN COLLINS

High above the swelter of Milan in mid-July, on the fourth floor of a handsome building flanked by magnolias and studded with balustrades, Laura Sartori Rimini is pouring mineral water into a pair of cups laid out on a silver platter. The calm of the rambling bourgeois apartment—where, for the past three decades, Sartori Rimini and her business partner, Roberto Peregalli, have run the design firm Studio Peregalli Sartori—belies the fact that, to use a not very Milanese term, it is crunch time. As April is to accountants, July is to interior architects who create penthouses and fincas and chateaux for clients who typically own several homes and expect to use them by the season. "The worst periods are before vacation and before Christmas, because we're really in the moment of trying to give people their houses," Sartori Rimini says.

Sartori Rimini is a serene presence, the kind of person who takes the time to fill your glass and look you in the eye and explain things at the length they require. She is wearing her work clothes: a billowing white Aquazurra blouse, Dries Van Noten pants in a silky leopard print, and sparkly black Mary Janes, topped with a profusion of interesting jewelry, including a rock-crystal pendant designed by Gabriella Crespi. A flickering candle and brass floor lamps shaded in parchment provide low, wistful light. You wouldn't guess that it is the middle of summer. You wouldn't guess that it is 2025, save for the WiFi code scrawled on a Post-it that someone has stuck to a heap of marble samples on top of a coffee table piled with monographs and magazines. A giant 17th-century oil painting of goats and sheep presides over the scene, adding to the feeling of having been transported to another moment in time.