Antica Barbieria Colla, Milan

The address on the door is not the original one. Antica Barbieria Colla opened in 1904 on Via Manzoni, moved not long after to a room opposite La Scala, and stayed there until the Allied bombing raids of 1943 took the building down. It reopened in 1944, a few streets over, at Via Gerolamo Morone 3 - and has not moved since. That is not the same claim as "unchanged since 1904." It is the better story: proof of something that survived, not something that was simply never touched.

Four people have carried it since. Dino Colla, who founded the bottega without ever picking up a razor himself - his contribution was the instinct that this could be an institution, not just a room with chairs in it. Guido Mantovanini, who held it through the decades after. Franco Bompieri, master barber and writer, who spent over forty years deepening what the place meant to the men who sat in its chairs. And now his daughter, Francesca, who in 2019 did something none of her predecessors had: she took the house's own formulas - oils, balms, colognes, built up over a century of mixing by hand - and turned them into a range the shop could put its own name to.

A few days ago in Milan I sat again for a beard trim and a shave with Maurizio, one of Francesca's barbers - not for the first time; he has looked after me on past visits too, though it took this one for me to stop thinking of it as a lucky booking. (Can I say, now, that I have a Milanese barber?) While he worked, Francesca talked me through the range - which scent was built around a regular's request forty years ago, which is newer, what each oil is actually for. It did not feel like being sold to. It felt closer to being shown a family archive that happens to be still in use.

The formulas carry the same instinct as the room they're made in: built slowly, adjusted rarely, made to last well past the person who first mixed them. Antica Barbieria Colla's range of beard oils, balms, and colognes is exclusive to Australia through The Leopard.