In 1968, while Matera’s families were still collecting warm milk from the cow shed on this street, northern Italy was designing the future.

Welcome to Milk, Matera’s most distinctive design complex nestled in the heart of the UNESCO-listed Sassi district. Abandoned since the 1970’s we are reopening this unique complex with private terraces with metaphysical views, Milk is a sanctuary of privacy and tranquility two of today’s rarest luxuries.

Milk Matera joins the Area 8 family, a growing collection of unique properties across southern Italy, each set in meticulously restored heritage buildings that blend history, privacy, and contemporary luxury.

Brining new lift to this block in the Sassi untouched for half a century.

The Area 8 creative team has recently breathed new life into the complex, honoring its rural roots while infusing it with a bold spirit, creating a versatile, collective community space for living, working and gathering. Whether for a creative retreat, digital nomad base, or private venue for dinners and next level events, Milk ticks all the boxes.

A former farmhouse.
Now a room worth thinking in.

One hundred square metres of open space, a mezzanine loft, tufa stone ceilings and a floor that has absorbed more than a century of southern Italian daily life. The Area 8 team restored it without flattening it.

The space holds a selection of original Italian mid-century pieces alongside long tables, fast fibre, and the kind of silence that Matera offers and most cities no longer can. It works for a team offsite, a creative retreat, a photoshoot, a private dinner, a workshop, or simply a week of uninterrupted work somewhere that doesn’t look like an office.

Two suites cut from the rock

The suites began as a tufa stone quarry. The men who carved it worked by hand, block by block, and we have left the marks of that work visible — on the walls, in the proportions of the rooms, in the roughness that no amount of renovation should have the right to smooth over.

Each suite looks east, over the Murgia nature reserve and the Gravina river cutting through the valley below. The furniture is from our collection of Italian mid-century originals: pieces that were being designed in Milan at the exact moment these walls were still sheltering cows. The juxtaposition is the point. It is also, in our experience, quietly exhilarating to live inside.

Three terraces.
Three hundred square metres.
One uninterrupted view.

The terraces face east over the Murgia nature reserve and the Gravina valley below, a landscape that has barely changed since Cartier-Bresson photographed it.
In the morning the light is extraordinary.
In the evening the stone cools and the view turns blue.

We use them for yoga at sunrise, for farm-to-table aperitivi at dusk, and for private dinners when someone has the right combination of guests and a reason to celebrate properly.
They are also simply very good places to do nothing.

Matera Urban Creative Centre for the Arts

A space for looking, thinking and making.
MUCCA is the cultural programme that runs through Milk. It is not a gallery and not a school, though it does things that resemble both.
It hosts intensive workshops and masterclasses in visual storytelling, editing, design and art direction running creative retreats, private sessions for concept development, design thinking and brand narrative.
At intervals it becomes a micro-festival: photography, sound, short cinema, independent publishing and cultural mapping arriving together for a few days before dispersing again.
MUCCA maintains an ongoing dialogue with universities, cultural institutes, foundations and festivals across Europe and the Mediterranean. Its archive is growing. Its doors are open to the right collaborators.
Are looking for a residency base, a workshop venue, or a partnership, we would like to hear from you.

The Great Divide

Matera sits at the instep of the Italian boot, about as far from Milan as a city can be and still be Italy. In the late 1960s, while Cassina, Artemide and Stilnovo were collaborating with Joe Colombo, Vico Magistretti and Gae Aulenti to produce some of the most radical furniture Europe had ever seen, this street was still collecting unpasteurised milk from the cows that lived in the building you are standing in now.

That contrast peasant south, industrial north; hand-carved tufa, space-age polyurethane is not a footnote to Italian design history. It is the story. And it is the story Milk is built on.

The building has been abandoned since the early 1970s. We have reopened it without erasing what it was: the stone quarry walls, the wooden beams, the ghost of the latteria. Into that framework we have placed a curated collection of Italy’s most significant mid-century originals, each piece authentic and restored so that the two Italys can finally occupy the same room.

“A third place: a place on the corner, real life alternative to a familiar public spot where you regularly connect with others known and unknown, over a shared interest or activity.”
Ray Oldenburg