Why you should experience NH Milano 2 Residence in Milan, Italy.
NH Milano 2 Residence is a secluded residential retreat where Milano 2's planned suburbanism, landscaped architecture, Italian television history and long-stay hospitality converge beside the community's Laghetto dei Cigni.
Set along Strada di Olgia near Via Fratelli Cervi and just steps from Palazzo dei Cigni, the residence occupies the landscaped center of Milano 2, where pedestrian and cycling routes cross above sunken automobile roads and connect residential buildings with a nearly 10,000-square-meter lake conceived as part of a 1970s alternative to Milan's dense urban fabric. Balconies and broad windows open the accommodations toward the lake and planted grounds, extending the surrounding residential plan into a property organized around longer stays. Fifty hotel rooms and 84 apartments reinforce that domestic orientation, with part of the residence extending into two floors of neighboring Palazzo dei Cigni. The result is a property whose accommodation model remains inseparable from the experimental residential district that created its physical setting.
What you should know about NH Milano 2 Residence.
NH Milano 2 Residence is best known for occupying part of Milano 2, the 1970-1979 residential development commissioned by Edilnord after Silvio Berlusconi acquired more than 70 hectares at Segrate from Count Leonardo Bonzi in 1968. Architects Giancarlo Ragazzi, Giuseppe Marvelli, Antonio d'Amato and Giulio Possa developed the architectural plan, with Enrico Hoffer responsible for the landscape design across a district conceived to separate pedestrian life from automobile traffic. The Ordine degli Architetti di Milano calculates 345,000 square meters of planted ground, equivalent to 85 percent of the development area and about 40 square meters per resident, alongside more than 5,000 trees, 10 kilometers of pedestrian paths and five kilometers of cycling routes. Only 10 percent of the site was occupied by buildings and five percent by roads, with vehicular routes lowered beneath portions of the pedestrian network to reduce their presence within the residential environment. The Laghetto dei Cigni became a central landscape element covering nearly 10,000 square meters, with an island, pier and planted eastern bank embedded within Hoffer's broader composition. Palazzo dei Cigni rises directly beside the lake and contains 21,000 square meters, including two floors incorporated into the NH residence operation. The residence itself dates to 1980, immediately following completion of the decade-long Milano 2 development, and now contains 134 accommodations divided between 50 hotel rooms and 84 apartments. Ragazzi, Marvelli, d'Amato, Possa and Hoffer supply an unusually coherent architectural and landscape lineage for a hotel residence whose 1980 opening followed directly from the construction of the surrounding planned community.
Palazzo dei Cigni connects the residence to a second chapter of Milano 2 history in which the district became an incubator for Silvio Berlusconi's television enterprise. Edilnord equipped apartments throughout Milano 2 with cable television infrastructure to eliminate individual rooftop antennas, creating the technical conditions for a neighborhood television service. Publisher Giacomo Properzi began transmitting Telemilanocavo from Palazzo dei Cigni in 1974, supplying residents with films, news and programming devoted to activities inside the development. Berlusconi later acquired the broadcaster, renamed it Telemilano and expanded the operation that became Canale 5 in 1980, placing the building beside the residence at the beginning of his national commercial television business. Palazzo dei Cigni subsequently served as an important Mediaset production and office site before those operations transferred to Cologno Monzese, and a monument by sculptor Pietro Cascella now stands on the piazza outside the building commemorating the creation of Milano 2. NH's own connection with the property belongs to another corporate consolidation: the Spanish group first acquired a 19.1 percent interest in Jolly Hotels in 1999 before taking control of the Italian chain through the Grande Jolly transaction in 2006 and 2007. The residence consequently joins two independent corporate histories within the same planned district, linking the building beside the birthplace of Telemilanocavo with the international hotel group created through NH's later absorption of Jolly Hotels.
How to fold NH Milano 2 Residence into your trip.
NH Milano 2 Residence works as the anchor for a day tracing the eastern metropolitan edge through experimental residential planning, modern Islamic architecture and a park designed to reconstruct the Lombard countryside.
Begin at Milano 2, conceived between 1969 and 1979 as Edilnord's self-contained residential development for 10,000 inhabitants after Silvio Berlusconi acquired the Segrate site from Leonardo Bonzi. Giancarlo Ragazzi, Giuseppe Marvelli, Antonio d'Amato, Giulio Possa and landscape architect Enrico Hoffer organized housing, planted ground and grade-separated circulation into an unusually controlled suburban plan whose development later became inseparable from Berlusconi's emergence as a national entrepreneur. Continue to Moschea Al-Rahman, inaugurated on May 28, 1988 by imam Ali Abu Shwaima and Rosario Pasquini of the Centro Islamico di Milano e Lombardia. Its six-meter copper-clad dome rises ten meters above the prayer hall and its minaret reaches fifteen meters, forming the first purpose-built mosque with both dome and minaret completed in Italy after the destruction of the mosque at Lucera in the thirteenth century. Conclude at Parco Lambro, created in 1936 by architect Enrico Casiraghi as an interpretation of the traditional Lombard landscape structured around the Lambro River, irrigation channels, artificial hills and two original lakes. Much of Casiraghi's planting disappeared during World War II as trees were cut for fuel, and Romano Beretta and the Comune di Milano technical office reconstructed and expanded the park during the 1950s and 1960s into the 773,000-square-meter territory maintained by the city. The progression moves from Ragazzi and Hoffer's comprehensively planned Milano 2 through Al-Rahman's watershed place in modern Italian religious architecture into Casiraghi and Beretta's reconstruction of the Lombard landscape, tracing three distinct experiments in shaping community and open space around NH Milano 2 Residence.
Where your story begins.
Foresyte Travel reveals places that feel extraordinary long before you arrive.
Experience premium editorial crafted for luxury travelers.
