In Grottaglie, Puglia, a small town known for centuries of ceramic making, art director Paola Nerilli and gallery owner Angelo Milano have built a home that never stops feeling like a workshop. This edition of Living with HAY steps inside their house, where bare stone walls and vaulted ceilings meet hand-painted tiles, contemporary art, and furniture Angelo once assumed he would always build himself.
Living with HAY in a House Angelo Built Himself
Angelo grew up in Grottaglie, and the house carries that history, arched doorways, vaulted ceilings and stone walls echoing the Arab and Byzantine influences that once shaped the region. He built much of it himself, tile by tile. “I’ve always tried to make my own things,” he says, “right down to the tiles I designed by hand, each one different from room to room.” Those hand-painted tiles run through nearly every space, changing colour and pattern from one room to the next. Looking back, Angelo calls the house “a personal challenge I embarked on by myself,” and says sitting in the finished garden for the first time felt like “a glorious moment.”
Colour, Art and a Life Lived Without Rules
Paola describes her approach to design as something that “quietly shapes the way we live, move, and feel within a space,” adding that what matters is never whether something is fashionable, only whether it has character. That same instinct shapes how she chooses art. “The art we have in our home says something about who we are as a couple, much like the furniture,” she explains, calling it a way of staying curious. It can be anything, she adds, even the most ordinary object can resonate if it speaks to you in that moment. Her own style, she says, is “eclectic and spontaneous,” built on mixing things that were never meant to go together. Angelo puts it more simply, colour “makes me happy,” he says, and living without it would go against their nature entirely.
The HAY Pieces That Hold the House Together
For a couple whose daily life moves between home and gallery in Grottaglie, Puglia, colour was never going to stay confined to the walls alone. Much of it now runs through the HAY pieces scattered across the rooms. The Quilton Sofa, in a vibrant green, anchors the living room, the spot where the couple relax, and their dog Cesare curls up beside them. “We are so happy we finally have a sofa,” Paola says, recalling years spent somehow living without one. Elsewhere, the Uchiwa Lounge Chair and its matching ottoman, by Doshi Levien in red and pink, have become Paola’s favourite piece in the house, alongside a low, sculptural Amanta Sofa by Mario Bellini, a 1966 design reissued by HAY. Outside, Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec’s Palissade furniture furnishes the garden Angelo only recently let himself enjoy. From the Quilton Sofa indoors to the Uchiwa Lounge Chair by the window, living with HAY has meant finding pieces confident enough in colour to sit next to work, the couple made themselves.
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