Nicole Hamilton

Michelini is a project uniting two apartments in San Michele di Pagana, Liguria, conceived as a home to be lived in throughout the year. The project draws inspiration from the principles of Purism: formal clarity, proportion, restraint, and the dialogue between art and architecture while moving beyond its historical austerity. It seeks instead a balance between the rigour of Italian Modernism and the intimacy of a home shaped by comfort, memory and everyday life. The Mediterranean landscape became an essential part of the concept. The proximity to the sea and surrounding vegetation inspired a palette of natural materials, warm timber and linen, complemented by carefully curated artworks and objects. Every element was selected for the meaning it brings to the space. Artworks, furniture, books and ceramics are not treated as independent decorative pieces, but as part of a continuous architectural dialogue. The result is a home designed to invite observation: of a painting, a book, the movement of light across a room, or the landscape extending into the interior. Its richness lies not in accumulation, but in what it chooses to preserve—and what it deliberately leaves unsaid.

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As I began transitioning my career towards interior design, I enrolled at Istituto Marangoni Milano, where I was awarded a scholarship after presenting my vision of the future of design through three images. After exploring different ideas, I kept returning to the story of Noah’s Ark and the idea of cycles — how nature, civilisation and the planet constantly transform and renew themselves. I became interested in the connection between the biblical flood and geological evidence of ancient flooding events, including sediment deposits and traces of former shorelines that reveal how dramatically water levels have changed throughout history. This led me to imagine a future shaped by rising sea levels, environmental instability, housing shortages and globalisation. Rather than designing architecture that simply resists these changes, I imagined a new way of living with them. The project proposes three adaptable homes designed for three radically different environments: water, mountains and desert. Together, they form the basis of new, mobile settlements that could adapt to changing landscapes and allow people to relocate as environmental conditions evolve. A biblical passage inspires each house: Water House — Genesis Mountain House — Exodus Desert House — Covenant

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