The bar stays while the retail front turns over at ERIS in Milan's Porta Venezia, where VELIA builds the room from replaceable wall panels, a grid of tubular supports and a frieze of programmable light.
The concept came from Studio Pesca, a Milan studio that works across communication and design: one space in Porta Venezia that is a bar and a pop-up retail platform at once. The design is by VELIA, the Rome practice Giorgio Azzariti and Edoardo Cappella set up in 2024, which draws on experience at studios and institutions including Herzog & de Meuron in Basel, David Chipperfield's office in Berlin and MoMA in New York. ERIS opened in 2025 with a motto that reads like a brief, "Always here, forever changing."
VELIA gives the motto physical form through three systems that work together. The first is on the walls, where the panels are carried by suspended, dry-mounted joinery and can be swapped out or rearranged. The opening set is in aluminium laminates. Each new installation can bring different panels, and with them a radically different look for the whole room.
The second is a grid of upright tubular supports. It sets out the bar and the storefront alike and puts the room's considerable height to work. Shelves interlock with the grid and can be reset as seats or as display, so a single frame can switch between hospitality and exhibition. The steel furniture can be moved as well.
Light does the third job. A continuous frieze of backlit polycarbonate panels circles the perimeter and is the heart of the lighting scheme, its programmable LEDs reaching across a broad range of colour, from soft gradients to saturated fields that fill the room. At the front, a pair of large windows and a terrace outside carry the same flexibility on to the street. Every new set-up inside is staged as an installation, in public view.
Continuity comes from the bar. Coffee from the Nudo micro-roastery and wines from Retrovino hold the permanent side of ERIS steady, while the retail front passes to a changing line-up of designers, brands and other creative projects, each invited in for a limited stay. VELIA presents the result as a mutable interior rather than a static one, a space "designed to host change without ever losing its identity."
