Perfect Darkness

Josephine Akvama Hoffmeyer runs her company File Under Pop from a spacious first-floor apartment overlooking Copenhagen’s Marble Church. She specializes in the craft of colorful handmade clay tiles—a passion she shares with Elisa Ossino, whose Milan studio focuses on residential interiors, product design and set design. In the early 2000s, the two met in Sicily, hit it off and have joined forces under the brand H+O for this year’s Milan Design Week.

“We wanted to create something new,” says Ossino, “and had worked on the concept of an apartment that also serves as a gallery—a regular home where we can experiment with interiors, and where both of us can contribute with our knowledge and expertise.”

Over the past year, Akvama Hoffmeyer and Ossino have been overseeing the restoration of a third-floor, 18th-century apartment on Milan’s Via Solferino—a design-rich spot in the city’s elegant Brera district. “The apartment had been damaged over the years, but the original flooring we uncovered is stunning and served as a starting point for our work,” Ossino says of the colorful terrazzo floor they found in every room after stripping the apartment.

The resulting project, entitled Perfect Darkness, sees the space transformed into an intimate installation in which H+O tiles serve as architectural elements, rather than purely decorative ones, through a careful juxtaposition of contrasting color schemes and interior design by Elisa Ossino Studio. In curating the exhibition, Akvama Hoffmeyer and Ossino also collaborated with a total of 11 firms and have enriched the Milanese space with Danish influences, merging traditional and contemporary Danish design pieces and objects from Menu, House of Finn Juhl, Frama, Artcoustic, Astep, Stine Goya and File Under Pop alongside those from Italian brands such Officine Saffi, De-Tech and Tubes.