Fashion Designer J.J. Martin’s Milan Home Is a Vibe
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J.J. Martin’s three-bedroom, three-bathroom apartment in Milan may seem too spacious for a single occupant. But she insists she needs the roughly 2,100-square-foot sanctuary for herself—and her ongoing stream of visitors. “I have people coming in and out all the time,” says the founder of La DoubleJ. “I’m now calling my apartment the healer hostile because I have so many visiting healers that come and then they use the meditation room to see clients. So it's literally become, in the last year and a half, a total wellness destination.”
Located in a Neo-Gothic-style building in a northwest neighborhood of the city, the apartment is well-suited for the avid party host and welcomer of guests. Although, in typical Italian home fashion, the unit didn’t come that way. It was void of lighting and closets, and every inch of the place was painted white. “I really don't like white walls,” Martin says. “I really don't. I find it so painful actually.”
The emergency-level situation required functional upgrades and a cosmetic makeover in vibrant colors and maximalist prints. Martin brought in the much-needed closets and shoe storage made from refurbished IKEA cabinets, layers of lighting, and even a 1990s Poliform kitchen. She turned one bedroom into a guest room, another into a meditation room, and one bathroom into a laundry room. Martin quickly painted all of the walls in custom-mixed shades. Then she slowly decorated each room simultaneously, mostly getting it to where it is now within eight months of moving in.
Breathing life into her home didn’t involve mood boards or any specific references. “I don't decorate by being like, ‘I'm going to be inspired by Palm Beach in the 1960s with C.Z. Guest’ or whatever it is,” Martin says. “I just collect a bunch of things that I love, and I just start to build and build and build… It's a very intuitive process that happens within my body—just the sensations I get of liking something or not.”
Martin typically starts with one major element. “What I love to do—and this kind of mimics my creative process at work with La DoubleJ—is there's usually a pattern or a print that I've found or I've seen that I want to develop in some way,” she says.
The dining room started with the custom wallpaper, which Martin’s friend, an artist, created based on Japanese collages Martin found in 2019. In the living room, Martin began with a carpet she acquired from an antique dealer in Milan. The navy blue-painted meditation room’s defining feature is the ceiling. It has golf leaf stars on it that were done by Martin’s friend Jay Lohmann, who is trained in painting Italian frescoes. The design mimics her favorite chapel in Ravenna, Italy, (where she got her dog, Pepper!) that has golf leaf mosaics in it. “I wanted him to paint on the navy blue using the gold, so it looked like the night sky with all these twinkling stars,” she says, noting it was done using a technique that looked straight out of the Renaissance since no modern tools were used.
The furnishings, lighting, and decor throughout the home are a mix of Martin’s creations for La DoubleJ and vintage pieces. One of the first big purchases she made was the Murano glass chandelier in the dining room. She spotted its bronze frame at a vintage dealer. All of the clear glass sticks were individually wrapped in brown paper, so she had to open them all up to better imagine what the chandelier would look like fully put together.
“It's so stunningly beautiful, that light fixture,” she says. “It's also really weird. It's not what you would maybe imagine putting with the wallpaper, which feels sort of romantic.”
As a longtime vintage collector, Martin maintains many special sets of treasures. She collects vintage jewelry (some of which she uses as wall decor and artful displays in bowls on tables), vintage plates, crystals, and Murano glass. Many items in her collections were sourced from flea markets, antique shops, donation centers, and sites like eBay, especially the international versions, including Germany and Italy.
While Martin still loves to collect, she no longer has the patience for serious vintage shopping that involves scouring a rotation of go-to sources. “Kind of since [COVID-19], I lost completely my desire to vintage shop,” she says. “And I would only go shopping now if I actually had another house to do… but I just don't do it anymore.”
The art on Martin’s walls tells a different story. “I've never been much of a collector of art,” she says. “But at the same time, I really love my walls to be filled with things that are artistic.”
Every art piece is personal to her in some way. She has a painting of herself created by a friend, who used to work at La DoubleJ, in the living room. There are three photographs taken by friends that were all framed and hung. “I sleep underneath this giant papyrus,” she says of the art hung over her bed. “It's an Egyptian papyrus of the Book of the Dead, and I go to Egypt every year to teach on this spiritual trip. And so it looks like this museum-quality, incredible thing, but it's tied back to my practice.”
While every room is a delight to be in, Martin spends most of her time in the kitchen and bedroom. “When I'm by myself, I'm always eating and reading,” she says, adding the kitchen is where she has most of her meals except for when she’s entertaining more than one or two people. “If there's more than three or four of us, I always serve in the dining room. And then if there are more than 12 of us, I do buffets and everyone is all over the place.”
Martin keeps all of the books she’s currently digging into on her bedroom nightstand. “I'm usually reading any one of five different books on consciousness or spirituality,” she says.
The bedroom is painted in a custom “earthy, dark brown-red” that she says “feels like you’re in the belly of the Earth” and is “so juicy.” Martin knows many people think dark bedroom colors are scary and depressing. “I find them very warm and very nurturing,” she says.
Martin’s residence truly captures her creative vision and her penchant for connecting with others—all while embodying her personal design philosophy to “never decorate your house in one era or style.” She explains: “I could never do the whole house in 1950s Italian or 1990s New York… I like to mix styles and eras. That's, for me, just as important as mixing materials and surfaces so that you've got something shiny, something soft, something rough, and something coarse. It's all this symphony.”
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