A new programme in Rome invites guests to live with contemporary art inside private apartments.
Burghesius, the Rome-based property management company, has launched Casa Galleria, a new cultural programme that converts selected apartments within its residential portfolio into temporary private galleries. The initiative, which opened its 2026 season this week, places contemporary artworks directly inside working domestic spaces, asking guests to live alongside the work rather than view it from a conventional gallery distance.
The concept was developed by Burghesius as an extension of the company’s existing approach to property management, which has centred on creating what its founders describe as meaningful cultural experiences within the homes it operates. Rather than commissioning decorative interventions, the programme invites artists whose practice is responsive to specific architecture and domestic environments to occupy and transform the spaces entirely. The work does not decorate the space. It activates it.
How It Works
Carefully selected apartments in Rome are made available to guests during the exhibition period. The artworks installed within them are not displayed on walls in the conventional sense. They are integrated into the rooms, responding to the geometry, light and domestic history of each space. Guests encounter the work over the course of their stay, returning to individual pieces across multiple visits and experiencing them in the shifting conditions of morning light, evening quiet and ordinary domestic use.
Burghesius describes the model as a deliberate challenge to the traditional separation between the gallery and the home. The company argues that proximity to art over an extended period, rather than the single concentrated visit that a conventional gallery demands, produces a different and deeper form of engagement. Whether that proposition holds will be tested by the responses of the guests who pass through the apartments during the season.
Austin Young: The Inaugural Artist
The first chapter of Casa Galleria is a collaboration with Austin Young, an American artist based in Los Angeles whose practice spans photography, installation, performative portraiture and public intervention. Young’s work is characterised by its site-responsiveness: he does not produce work in a studio and install it in a space, but develops work in direct response to the specific architecture and social character of each location.
His subjects are frequently drawn from subcultures and communities that occupy marginal positions in mainstream cultural life. The visual language he applies to those subjects is rigorous and monumental, a deliberate tension between the overlooked and the ceremonial that has defined his practice across two decades of international exhibition.
Within the Casa Galleria apartments, Young has developed an installation that operates across multiple registers simultaneously. A single room may contain a photographic series, a sculptural object and traces of a performative action, each element in dialogue with the others and with the domestic architecture that contains them. The cumulative effect, according to Burghesius, is a transformation of the apartment into what the company calls a porous threshold between private and public, spectacle and sanctuary.
Guests live alongside the work, return to it throughout their stay, and discover new meanings in moments of quiet attention.
What Burghesius Is Trying to Achieve
Casa Galleria sits within a broader trend in the contemporary art world toward non-institutional exhibition formats. Private residences, commercial spaces and civic buildings have increasingly been used as exhibition venues over the past decade, driven partly by the high costs of conventional gallery operation and partly by a genuine appetite among artists and audiences for encounters with art outside the white cube context.
What distinguishes the Burghesius model from a simple pop-up exhibition is the time dimension. Because the apartments function as guest accommodation during the exhibition period, visitors are not making a single timed visit. They are spending nights and days inside the work, waking up to it, eating breakfast beside it, and leaving it behind when they go out into the city. That extended proximity is the core proposition of the programme, and it is one that few exhibition formats in Rome currently offer.
Access and Availability
Casa Galleria apartments are bookable through the Burghesius platform. The company has not published a fixed exhibition schedule for the full 2026 season, describing the programme as an evolving series of collaborations with artists to be announced. Further details on upcoming exhibitions, participating apartments and booking availability are available at burghesius.com.
Burghesius was founded, and is managed, by brothers Lavinia and Gregorio Borghese.
