Why you should experience Nu Hotel in Milan, Italy.
Nu Hotel is an inventive design retreat where Cimiano's postwar expansion, Lambrate's creative character, Milanese architectural experimentation and the Gao family's cross-cultural hospitality converge inside a radically hollowed existing building.
Set along Via Feltre near Via Crescenzago and just steps from Feltre, the hotel occupies Milan's northeastern transition toward Parco Lambro where postwar residential planning, Carlo De Carli's architectural work and the former industrial territory of Lambrate developed across a district transformed during the city's twentieth-century expansion. A severe black parallelepiped surrounds a six-storey internal void, creating a deliberate contrast between the disciplined exterior and irregular circulation routes carved through the interior. Suspended beds, charred wooden doors, exposed iron and bush-hammered concrete continue that architectural experiment across 38 individually configured rooms. The result is a small hotel whose spatial invention and bespoke design program give an existing Milanese building the character of a purpose-conceived work of contemporary architecture.
What you should know about Nu Hotel.
Nu Hotel is best known for Massimo Gao's transformation of an existing Via Feltre building into a 38-room art hotel through an architectural collaboration with Nisi Magnoni and Sabrina Gallini of NM-Architetti. The project developed from conversations between Gao and Gallini about extending the NU name beyond the family's restaurant business, whose Milanese history included NU Pure Asian Cuisine and an established combination of Japanese dining with Italian design. Gao commissioned a rebellious reconstruction that retained only the perimeter walls of the existing structure, removing its interior before rebuilding five levels plus a rooftop restaurant inside the inherited shell. Magnoni and Gallini organized the new building around a void cutting vertically through six storeys, an architectural solution granted a specific departure from prevailing building requirements governing intermediate floor slabs and coverings. The void became the project's central spatial mechanism, disrupting the rigid geometry of the black external volume and connecting guestrooms with irregular internal circulation routes. No standardized room plan was repeated across the 38 accommodations; NM-Architetti developed different dimensions and configurations alongside suspended beds, doorless wardrobes, charred timber doors, exposed iron and bush-hammered concrete. Project credits extend the architectural authorship through Nadia Di Blasio and Davide Galletta alongside Magnoni and Gallini, with Massimo Gao identified as client. The completed hotel opened in April 2012, carrying the NU concept from Gao's Asian restaurants into hospitality through a building conceived around architectural variation rather than a conventional standardized hotel plan.
Cacao Design translated that architectural program into the property's graphic authorship after Massimo Gao commissioned the Milan studio to develop the complete NU Hotel visual system in 2012. The agency had already worked on NU Pure Asian Cuisine and NU-Cube, allowing the hotel's branding to evolve directly from the Gao family's earlier restaurant projects instead of beginning as an unrelated hospitality commission. Cacao Design drew from Magnoni and Gallini's architecture when developing the hotel's communication objects, extending the principle of individually conceived elements from the physical building into the graphic system. Alessandro Chiesa supplied another early creative connection as chef of NU Italian Restaurant, adapting the NU name's established association with Asian dining into predominantly Italian cooking on the building's upper floor. The restaurant itself completed the architectural sequence as a glazed rooftop volume illuminated overhead by hundreds of lamps, with a teak terrace wrapping around the perimeter of the black structure. Massimo Gao, NM-Architetti, Cacao Design and Alessandro Chiesa consequently developed architecture, graphic design and gastronomy as connected extensions of the same NU project, giving the 2012 hotel a degree of named creative authorship unusual for a property of only 38 rooms.
How to fold Nu Hotel into your trip.
Nu Hotel works as the anchor for a day tracing northeastern Milan through experimental postwar housing, Carlo De Carli's ecclesiastical architecture and the institutional history of one of the city's most consequential orphanages.
Begin at Feltre, developed between 1957 and 1960 during Milan's immense postwar housing expansion through a planning team led by Gino Pollini with architects including Giancarlo De Carlo, Ignazio Gardella and Carlo De Carli. The INA-Casa development combined residential towers, lower blocks and extensive planted ground beside Parco Lambro, making the district an unusually concentrated expression of the architects shaping Italian housing during the economic boom. Continue to Chiesa di San Gerolamo Emiliani, which De Carli developed between 1952 and 1965 as the religious center of a wider educational and social-assistance complex created during Cimiano's expansion. De Carli worked through three principal schemes, progressing from a rectangular church proposed in 1953 through a bell-shaped plan with a central altar before reaching the executed solution, whose reinforced-concrete structure and carefully controlled openings joined his broader investigations into modern Catholic architecture. Conclude at Istituto Milanese Martinitt e Stelline on Via Pitteri, whose five rectangular pavilions form a C-shaped complex created as the twentieth-century home of Milan's historic institution for orphaned boys. The Martinitt lineage reaches the sixteenth century and later produced alumni including publisher Angelo Rizzoli, Bianchi founder Edoardo Bianchi and Luxottica founder Leonardo Del Vecchio, connecting the institution with three major chapters of Italian industrial history. The progression moves from Pollini, De Carlo, Gardella and De Carli's postwar housing experiment through De Carli's evolving church project into the Martinitt institution that educated future industrial entrepreneurs, revealing the architectural and social ambitions that reshaped northeastern Milan around Nu Hotel.
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