Vico Magistretti spent his entire career working in the studio at the corner of Via Conservatorio and Via Vincenzo Bellini in Milan, in the building designed in 1933 by his father, the architect Pier Giulio Magistretti.

It was a small studio, modest in size: barely eighty square metres on the raised ground floor, made up of three rooms, and not even fifty in the basement, where the archive was kept alongside a very basic bathroom (there was no hot water until as late as 2010!).  The staff was equally small: Vico himself, of course, and Franco Montella, his trusted and exceptional assistant.
As Magistretti liked to say: 

“My office is a very small one because I decided from the beginning to be an architect and a designer, not a manger."

In 2010, four years after Magistretti's death and three after the Lombardy Archival Superintendence formally recognised the “special historical importance” of his archive, the studio was turned into a museum, or rather, a studio museum.
Here, preservation, research, enhancement, interpretation and promotion of his archive and his work as an architect and designer coexist and interact with original features of the place where Magistretti worked for over sixty years.

The Montella's room, once crammed with drafting tables, closets, chests of drawers, tables, chairs, prototypes and a counter, is now the setting for the foundation's temporary exhibitions, where Magistretti’s projects, objects and words come together offering new insights and stories about his work.

The meeting room, today also an archival consultation space, still contain the table installed there by Pier Giulio and the Sonora lamp, chosen – and indeed designed – by Vico.

And then there is Vico's own room, properly his studio, preserved almost exactly as it was – one only needs to imagine it without the computers, scanner and printer used today by the foundation’s staff - with its two work desks, the black leather sofa (Portovenere, designed by him, needless to say) and the wooden panels on the walls covered with drawings, photos, postcards, letters and notes.
Here, in the window recess, Vico had placed a mirror that allowed him to glimpse, without leaving his desk, the side apses of the Renaissance church of Santa Maria della Passione. 
He loved to tell about his studio: 

“It's lovely here, it seems like a little square from 1850 in Busto Arsizio. My father did this building, I did the one next to it; there, in front, is the Collegio delle Fanciulle done by my great-great-grandfather at the time of Napoleon. He was Gaetano Besia, a good architect, and here, back then, there was open countryside”.

The founding members of the foundation include Triennale Milano, Artemide, Cassina, De Padova, Flou and Oluce.

Fondazione studio museo Vico Magistretti hosts design and architecture exhibitions on its premises; it offers guided tours, talks and encounters on these same themes, as well as workshops and educational activities for schools.