The Best of Milan Design Week 2019, Part II — Salone Satellite

We're devoting all of our coverage this week to the 2019 Milan furniture fair, from the best things we saw around town, to the best of this year's Euroluce show, to the up-and-coming designers and new brands we discovered along the way. Today we're sharing our 13 favorite collections at Salone Satellite, the section of the Salone del Mobile fairgrounds devoted to emerging talents — which is where we discovered many a Sight Unseen veteran back in the day, from Sebastian Herkner to Ana Kras.
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Emerging Dutch designers Truly Truly

This Dutch-Based Studio Was the Best Thing We Saw at Salone Satellite

The Dutch-based studio Truly Truly finds a comfortable niche oscillating between product design and experience, creating artful and engaging moments for the viewer that fall between familiarity and curiosity. Their latest work, presented at last week’s Salone Satellite, features projects that combine technical ingenuity with new aesthetics — their morphing Touch glass lights are cast using a dynamic mold that allows for more expressive surface qualities, while the Wove chair plays on the graphic interplay of two differently colored bent-wire frames. And of course we were instantly magnetized by the Daze table – folded, aluminum volumes with subtle corner slits, which allow flashes of hazy, powder-coated color to burst through.
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10 Designers and Brands to Watch at Salone del Mobile

Of course we'll always head to Salone del Mobile to see what's new with some of our favorite companies like Vitra, Moroso, e15, Glas Italia, and Flos, as well as to scout the emerging talent section, Salone Satellite. But the sheer number of independent designers who are either planning their own booths or who have major projects with big-name companies seems to have increased this year — including Raw Color for Nanimarquina, Max Lamb for Bitossi, Philippe Malouin for Resident, and Atelier de Troupe and Lambert & Fils at Euroluce. Most of the launches are still under wraps for now, but we've picked 10 of our favorite designers and brands to give you a sneak peek of what's to come starting April 4.
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10 Things We’re Looking Forward to at This Year’s Salone del Mobile

When we attended our very first Salone del Mobile fair in Milan a decade ago, we were instantly swept up in the magic of an event that’s served as the epicenter of the contemporary design world since 1961, and that each year packs a 2.5 million square-foot convention center (plus an entire surrounding city) full of everything that's new and next in furniture and lighting, from future classics by mega-brands to prototypes by design-school grads. Here are the 10 things we're most looking forward to at this year's show, which begins April 12.
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e7’s Zinc Project Was One of This Year’s Salone Satellite Standouts

Our last bit of Milan coverage this week comes from a brand-new design studio comprised of three ECAL grads — Giulia Chéhab from Italy, Micael Filipe from Portugal and Romain Viricel from France — whose Zinc Project caught our eye in the very last row of this year's Salone Satellite. A table and shelf series made from galvanized zinc, the project was inspired by the aesthetic irregularities that arise from the galvanization process.
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Salone Satellite at La Rinascente

From now until Christmas, pieces by 11 standout stars from this year's Salone Satellite young designers' showcase in Milan will be on view and for sale at La Rinascente. Considering that the Milan-based department store is basically Italy's version of Barneys, this is kind of a Big Deal for those young designers on the verge of stardom. And if the pieces look like they could actually be part of the same collection, perhaps it's because they all tackle the same theme from last year's Satellite: “Design and Craftsmanship: Together for Industry," a typically Italian name that just means that the designers were tasked with figuring out how to retain traditional craftsmanship techniques and processes while still producing for a mass audience. It's also because many of the items draw from a similar materials palette: "This is a compendium of “poor” materials, ranging from wood to glass, to iron to terracotta, reinterpreted and worked in a surprising fusion of craftsmanship and industrial techniques." We've picked some of our favorites to share with you today.
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Inspired by Italian Modernism, the Opulence of Paris, or a Brutalist Viennese Church, These Three Up-and-Coming Design Studios Wowed in Milan

Before we leave the spring design fair season entirely, we'd be remiss if we didn't call out three of our favorite up-and-coming studios from Milan. Milan Design Week this year was, as usual, awash with global brands whose impressive, big-budget presentations took up the majority of space around the city — not to mention air time on Instagram. But that doesn’t mean that the emerging and independent designers weren’t represented as well — they just required a bit more searching among the noise.
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A Modernist Villa Outside Milan Provided the Backdrop for This Stellar Showcase of Emerging Design

This year in Milan, Alcova's founders chose to host half of its exhibition in one of our all-time favorite buildings: Villa Borsani, the 1945 residence designed by Osvaldo Borsani, architect and co-founder of furniture brand Tecno, in Varedo, north of the city. Although much of Borsani’s incredible original furniture was tucked away for the occasion (a reason to go back and revisit), several designers presented impressive new works against the villa’s striking patterned marble floors, custom textiles, and that staircase. Here are a few of our favorite things we spotted there, which, coincidentally, also provides a tour of sorts around this iconic building.
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How Should We Live Now? In Milan, RISD’s Objects May Shift Exhibition Offered a Woozy Vision for Our Domestic Future

As a general rule, Milan thrives on spectacle. Some of the most memorable Salone exhibitions in recent years have relied on elaborate scenography, from Established & Sons in 2010 — when the British furniture brand filled a former Jai Alai court with walled "rooms" made from stacks of untreated tulipwood — to 2018, when Hermès constructed, over the course of three weeks inside a Milanese museum, seven towering pavilions made from thousands of jewel-toned zellige tiles. (Ask me what was inside those pavilions? Zero recollection.) So how is a student-run exhibition, from a newly founded design course exhibiting in Milan for the first time, supposed to compete? That was the conundrum facing 20 Rhode Island School of Design students, who debuted the conceptually-driven show Objects May Shift at Salone Satellite in Milan last month.
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