A micro-hotel within a factory, a grand courtyard inside a storied Milanese building: this is the Mua Mua Hotel, a project from Tom Dixon's Design Research Studio. Born as a temporary showcase for Dixon's collections during Milan Design Week, it has since opened its doors as a permanent hotel.
The Mua Mua Hotel
The Soul of Old Milan
The Mua Mua Hotel occupies a location with a genuinely compelling past — a century-old building of rare architectural beauty, tucked into a corner of Milan that most visitors never think to seek out. Quietly residential, richly green, and delightfully removed from the tourist circuit, it sits a short distance from the gleaming towers of City Life, yet feels entirely apart from them.
Steps away stands Villa Simonetta, the first patrician Renaissance villa at the gates of Milan, now home to the Claudio Abbado School of Music. The surrounding streets are unhurried; the metro runs nearby, the traffic is thin, and the nights are genuinely quiet.
The building itself dates to the late 1920s. Designed by Cesare Chiodi and Gio Ponti in 1929, it operated as an industrial mill until the 1950s, when the family who owned it was unable to continue the business, and the mill fell silent.
What happened next is rather marvellous. Ludovica Virga, the family's third generation, decided some years ago that the complex deserved a second life. She transformed it into an authentic creative factory, restoring and reimagining the various buildings and workshops arranged around the central courtyard. Today, the space is shared between the Mua Mua showroom — Virga's own fashion brand — the studio of artist Lola Montes Schnabel, the art atelier of SAGG Napoli, a martial arts gym. And, of course, the Mua Mua Hotel itself, a retreat of just twelve rooms.
The Charm of Small Spaces
The name, too, has a certain lightness to it. “Muà muà” is the Italian onomatopoeia for the sound of kissing on both cheeks in greeting — a breezy, affectionate salutation for a hotel with an equally breezy spirit. There is nothing grand or imposing about the arrival: guests enter through a modest door that opens onto a small sitting room, warm and intimate in the manner of a well-loved Milanese apartment.
The rooms are distributed across two floors, connected by the original staircase, which leads to a corridor onto which each room opens. The spaces are undeniably compact — but what they lack in scale, they more than compensate for in character. Both the private rooms and the communal areas blend vintage pieces with selections from Tom Dixon's collections to quietly dazzling effect.
The beds are, unquestionably, the centrepiece of each room; which is, of course, exactly as it should be in a hotel. But here they do rather more than simply occupy space. Each one creates its own atmosphere: imposing headboards, considered upholstery, and a quality of rest that genuinely earns the word restorative.
Discreet Artisanal Luxury
During Milan Design Week, Tom Dixon unveiled a new collection of headboards and beds created in collaboration with Vispring, the Mua Mua Hotel's bed partner of choice. Vispring is a British company with 125 years of heritage behind it, specialising in handcrafted beds of the highest order — its mattress springs are still individually hand-nested. Dixon's involvement enriches that long manufacturing legacy with a contemporary design sensibility that feels both innovative and entirely natural.
The new collection, which takes centre stage in the hotel's bedrooms, comprises four new headboards and a complete bed frame, each inspired by iconic Dixon designs: the Groove headboard (available with a matching footboard), the Heart, the Rainbow, the Wingback, and the complete Fat Bed frame with integrated headboard. Dixon has spoken of a particular satisfaction in entering a category he had never previously explored — after all, the bed is the piece of furniture we spend the most time in contact with, and it deserves to be celebrated accordingly.
A curved canopy here, a headboard shaped like wide-open eyes there, another in the form of a heart: the Mua Mua Hotel is many things, but it is never, for a single moment, dull.
Why It Matters
For those in search of a Milan address that diverges entirely from the usual — the grand hotel corridors, the predictable design-district proximity — the Mua Mua Hotel is something of a revelation. It exists off the expected map, inside a courtyard populated by creatives, carrying the particular enchantment of an older Milan that the city's glossier quarters have long since left behind. The atmosphere is unmistakably Milanese and yet entirely international; the design is contemporary without surrendering warmth; and the knowledge that one is sleeping somewhere with a genuine story makes the whole stay feel rather more meaningful than most.
For further details, visit the Mua Mua Hotel on Instagram.
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Last Updated on October 27, 2026 by Editorial Team
