The Macherio linen manufacturer, supplier to luxury hotels since 1867, opens at Viale Piave 40 with interiors by Galli Cavalcabò and a first collection of robes and pyjamas
Rivolta Carmignani opened its first single-brand boutique on 14 October 2026, at Viale Piave 40 in Milan, in Porta Venezia. The company, founded in 1867 and based at Macherio in Brianza, makes high-end linen and built its business supplying hotels and restaurants. The boutique is its first direct retail address, and it coincides with the launch of its first Homewear collection: robes, pyjamas and nightshirts in silk. The interiors are by Galli Cavalcabò, an architecture and interior design studio in Como.
The company is run by the fifth and sixth generations of the family — Matteo Rivolta as president, Filippo Rivolta as chief executive. Leopoldo Rivolta started it, and the factory at Macherio went up in the second half of the nineteenth century. The early work was personalised linen: heraldic crests first, then logos for hotels, restaurants and shipping lines. It worked with Roberta di Camerino and with the Marchesa Olga di Grésy, and its bed linen and tablecloths took their patterns from Art Nouveau and Art Deco.
Rivolta Carmignani boutique Milan, Viale Piave 40: a return to the city after 1941
Rivolta Carmignani kept a shop in Via Montenapoleone from 1887 to 1941. Viale Piave is the first address it has held in the city since.
The street has its own hospitality history. At number 42, next door, stands the former Kursaal Diana, designed by the architect Achille Manfredini and inaugurated on 1 October 1908: a hotel with a restaurant, a ballroom, a pelota court and an 850-seat theatre, fitted at opening with en-suite bathrooms, electric light, a telephone on each floor and centralised heating. It replaced the Bagni di Diana, opened in 1842 to a design by Andrea Pizzala and the first public swimming pool in Italy — a basin of 100 by 25 metres, one to three metres deep, with 120 changing cabins, fed by the Gerenzana stream off the Naviglio della Martesana. The pool was demolished in 1907; the hotel’s garden, about 700 square metres, was laid out over it and is still there. On 23 March 1921 a bomb went off during a show in the theatre, killing 21 people and injuring 80. The theatre became a cinema in 1928 and closed in 1989. The hotel, latterly the Sheraton Diana Majestic, announced its closure in late 2024, after the owner declined to renew the management contract with Marriott International.
One of the new collections in the boutique is called Diana, and takes its pattern from Liberty stained glass. Porta Venezia is the district where most of Milan’s Liberty architecture stands: Casa Galimberti and Casa Guazzoni in Via Malpighi, both by Giovan Battista Bossi; Palazzo Castiglioni by Giuseppe Sommaruga on Corso Venezia; Casa Campanini, with stained glass and ironwork by Alessandro Mazzucotelli.
From hotel linen to home textiles: percale, sateen, linen, terry, jacquard
The boutique carries the Home Collection, launched in 2019, in full: bed linen, bath linen, table linen, textile accessories. The materials are the ones the company supplies to hotels — pure cotton sateen and percale, linen, terry, jacquard, embroidery. Percale is a plain weave, matte and close; sateen is warp-faced, which gives it the sheen and the slip. Both are judged on yarn count and finishing, where a hotel supplier’s standards show.
The palette runs white, sand, blue and dew green.
Four collections are on display. Diana translates Liberty floral motifs into embroidery and jacquard. Brera uses a scrolling curl drawn from Art Deco architectural decoration. Icon runs a triple coloured cord across pure cotton sateen. Royal combines tailored embroidery with gold thread.
Galli Cavalcabò designs the Rivolta Carmignani boutique as a house to walk through
Galli Cavalcabò, based in Via Milano in Como, works on architecture, interiors and product design; its projects include the renovation of Villa Ego, a historic villa at Torno on Lake Como, and a lamp shown during Milan Design Week.
Here the studio has worked against retail scale. The route runs through small rooms. Wood boiserie and parquet form the shell; fabric is used architecturally, not only as product. In the back room a continuous curtain wraps the walls. Niches, alcoves and passages read as fragments of a hotel room, a wardrobe and a lived-in house.
Two details were drawn for the space. The entrance handle is cast in bronze in the form of a needle threaded with its own thread. The same thread reappears on the staircase balustrade, unwound across the void and held by small brass spheres. At the centre of the route, a large travelling trunk has been converted into a display case for textile pieces and accessories.
The upper floor holds the Bespoke area, run as an atelier for commissions. Clients choose fabric, colour, embroidery and finish, for a trousseau or a textile scheme for a house. This is the oldest part of the business — crests for private households, then marks for hotels, restaurants and shipping lines — opened now to private clients and interior designers.
The first Rivolta Carmignani Homewear collection: Lazy Silk and Foulard
The Homewear line comes out of the two pure silk collections already in the Home Collection. Lazy Silk is stonewashed silk, finished to give a velvet handle and a matte surface. Foulard is pure silk with a hand-rolled roulé hem.
The clothes are robes, pyjamas and nightshirts, cut plain and finished with tone-on-tone silk piping. Women’s pieces are in off-white, the tone of old household linen; men’s in anthracite grey. Suede slippers complete the line, in the same colours, with an embroidered lion on the vamp.
Rivolta Carmignani turns to direct-to-consumer retail
The boutique is part of a shift towards direct retail and the B2C segment, after a business built on luxury hospitality, wholesale and custom projects.
«The opening of the Milan boutique is a step in Rivolta Carmignani’s development strategy and in consolidating our presence in the B2C segment», says Filippo Rivolta, chief executive. «After a history built mainly through luxury hospitality, wholesale and custom projects, we have chosen to strengthen the direct relationship with the end client. Milan is a strategic market for this: the boutique lets us meet the public more closely, talk to a new generation of clients and to the world of interior designers, and reinforce the brand’s recognisability».
Matteo Rivolta, president, sets the opening against the family’s six generations: «Rivolta Carmignani’s heritage is made of knowledge, textile culture and an Italian way of conceiving quality, in which manufacturing tradition and innovation have always been able to talk to each other».
Rivolta Carmignani boutique Milan: address
Viale Piave 40, 20129 Milan. Opened 14 October 2026.
