NOÏ
NOÏ is a minimalist tea house and pilates studio located in Milan, Italy, designed by AIM. Few adaptive reuse projects manage to hold two entirely unrelated programs in genuine equilibrium. AIM’s conversion of a former comic book store in Milan’s Moscova district into a Japanese-inspired tea house that shares its footprint with a pilates reformer studio is one of those rare cases where programmatic tension becomes the project’s defining strength. The approach recalls the layered spatial strategies of Carlo Scarpa’s Venetian interventions, where new insertions never erase what came before but instead amplify the character already embedded in a building’s bones.
The original shell – once lined floor to ceiling with towering bookshelves – retains its volumetric presence. Rather than stripping the space back to a blank canvas, AIM treated its imperfections, raw surfaces, and material traces as active participants in the new composition. This philosophy of enhancement over erasure gives NOÏ an immediate sense of depth that freshly constructed interiors rarely achieve. The patina of the existing structure is not a backdrop but a co-author.
A decisive horizontal line running the full length of the interior establishes the project’s governing logic. Below it, surfaces are compact and smooth, clad in resin that reads as both contemporary and tactile. Above, coarse lime plaster introduces a rougher, more atmospheric register, animated by plays of light filtering through screens and translucent panels. The dialogue between these two material zones – one grounded and dense, the other open and diffuse – produces a quality of suspension, as though the upper portion of the room floats free from its anchored base. This kind of deliberate material bifurcation has roots in Japanese spatial thinking, where the relationship between earthbound solidity and ethereal lightness carries philosophical weight.