Above: Zevi’s Milan gallery staged a multi-artist show during this spring’s design week.
The love story begins, as so many do, with dinner. It was a spring evening in 2022, and Sofia Zevi—a recent New York transplant to Milan—was at her favorite spot, Il Consolare, on one of her favorite streets. She decided to take advantage of the balmy weather with a stroll over the cobblestones. Suddenly she saw it, an empty space with a sign: FOR RENT.
Nearly a year later, in April 2023, Zevi opened her gallery in that space on Via Ciovasso. “I saw it, and I did it,” says Zevi, who had been dreaming of a permanent showcase for talents from Italy and around the globe. She inaugurated the space with an exhibition created with architect Edgar Jayet, glass artist Akira Hara, and textile expert Chiarastella Cattana.
Sofia Zevi. “We aim to show things in harmony in the gallery, but also in a very unexpected way—in different contexts,” she says.
This layered, interdisciplinary approach has become a hallmark. For this year’s design week fair, Zevi mixed industrial-inspired light fixtures by the Back Studio, chairs from A-List architect Annabelle Selldorf’s Vica line (with fabrics by Cattana), new glass pieces by Hara, and vintage furniture from Italian midcentury master Ico Parisi. Now she’s bringing that eye to residential projects, with an interiors practice that grew out of informal work with friends.
A chair from architect Annabelle Selldorf’s Vica collection.
Just don’t call any of it design. “I don’t really like to use the word, because I’m not actually sure what it means anymore,” Zevi says. “I think one should really talk about art, because the level of craftsmanship and the quality and the creativity are at an artistic level.”
Zevi herself has an interdisciplinary background. An NYU economics grad, she worked at Citigroup before leaving for positions at Celine and then Prada. Next came an MBA program at MIT, where she studied with then-professor Neri Oxman, “a huge inspiration.”
Akira Hara’s glass works.
“I strive for harmony,” Zevi adds, pointing to the deceptive simplicity of Selldorf’s chairs, based on ones by the architect’s grandmother. “It’s a design that has been thought over for the last 70 years. If you work on something for that long, it will become very good.”
This story originally appeared in the Summer 2025 issue of Elle Decor. SUBSCRIBE
