An Interview With Formafantasma, Whose Queer-Coded, Modernism-Inspired Solo Show Was the Best Thing We Saw at This Year’s Milan Fair

In the whirlwind of this year’s Salone, Formafantasma’s perfect solo show, La Casa Dentro — presented on the quiet second floor of the Fondazione ICA Milano — made us stop and catch our breath. La Casa Dentro (meaning The Home Within) is as much a collection of furniture and lighting as it is a meditation on design, memory, the familiar, and the uncanny. It conjures a dream state where the clinical feel of a medical office gives way to the comforts of an old family home (if your grandparents were the kind with an eye for stylish detail). Bent tubular metal forms are combined with embroideries and embellishments painted on wood, floral patterns, and silky decorative fabric. It's work that takes certain signifiers of the past and reanimates them in a new moment. Attempting to “queer the codes of Modernist design,” as the designers put it, the collection is as conceptually charged as it is materially stunning, and its theoretical considerations can’t be unraveled from personal and emotional ones.
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In This Dutch Designer’s Hands, Even a Door Handle Becomes a Piece of Sculpture

So pretty. So minimal. That, in a nutshell, is the work of Dutch product designer Jeroen van de Gruiter. A recent graduate of Design Academy Eindhoven, van de Gruiter’s work plays with the tension between what a thing appears to be and how we choose to let it function in the world. His objects are as much about themselves as anything else: the way they take up space, shifting and fluctuating, contrasting and offsetting — other objects as well as their surroundings. They are concept made manifest; latent potential given concrete form.
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50 Pieces and Presentations We Loved at The 2024 Milan Furniture Fair

Rather than seeing the ever-spiraling array of events at Salone as a source of FOMO and a series of missed opportunities a journalist could never hope to comprehensively cover, we began to look at Milan in a new light this year, and you'll see that reflected in our coverage. We'll be devoting longer stories to particular favorites, or to things that maybe passed under your radar, rather than doing roundups of every single thing we saw and liked. We'll be focusing as much as possible on independent designers. We'll be shining a light on smaller, non-newsy things we saw, like the wonderful Cini Boeri archive exhibit at a library in Parco Sempione we never knew existed? For now, though, here is our one roundup of 50 favorites.
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30 Projects We Loved at the 2024 Stockholm Furniture Fair

Perhaps no design fair makes me philosophize about the future of trade shows more than Stockholm. A small fair that has become even more compact over the past few years, as Danish brands have increasingly shifted their calendar to coincide with Copenhagen's 3 Days of Design, Stockholm tends to particularly shine in two areas that make a fair worth having in the first place: its curation — not only in booths but also in talks that one might actually care to attend — and the idea that sustainability ought to be baked in at every turn, or else what's the point of making new things?
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The Best of the Salone del Mobile 2023: Part III

Today we’re featuring the best of Salone Satellite — the fair's emerging designer showcase — as well as Alcova and the rest of the Fuorisalone around town. Some favorites included the hefty, haute glass kettlebells by Chef Deco at Alcova, Daisuke Yamamoto's lightweight gauge steel chairs at Drop City, Sunnei's Murano glass pleasure objects at Convey, Loewe's tinsel and yarn repurposed chairs, and a swampy green shimmering glass bench and tubular steel chair at Satellite. 
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The Best of Salone Del Mobile 2023, Part II

Today we're focusing on brands: We loved the collection at Cassina — though it was hard to see through the throngs — and the brand's iMaestri exhibition, in a former bank vault, curated by Patricia Urquiola against a backdrop of blood red. Other standouts included a quiet presentation of lovely geometric rugs by Ruckstuhl at Assab One, Studiopepe's shock of lime green coffee table for Sancal, the addition of two friends of SU to the Tacchini stable (Umberto Bellardi Ricci and Brian Thoreen), Phillippe Malouin's cheeky magnetic lamp for Flos, Knoll's desert jungle pavilion, Acerbis's 1970s throwback in the form of a John Chamberlain-esque sofa system by Claudio Salocchi, and the debut of one of our favorite lamps — Mangiarotti's Lari lamp for Karakter — in a new, tiny, USB-charged portable size. 
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The Best of the 2023 Salone Del Mobile — Part I

While Salone del Mobile has often felt too sprawling for one person to take in, this was the year it seemed to fracture entirely. Scrolling through other people's Instagram Stories, seeing exhibitions that hadn't even made it onto my radar, much less my extensive Google doc, made me stop and wonder: "Are we even at the same fair?" The exhibition we loved the most though — and heard uniformly wonderful things about — was by Objects of Common Interest, who developed their experiments in opalescent resin into a full-fledged collection for Nilufar Depot, so we'll kick off our Milan recaps with that!
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The Best of the 2022 Salone Del Mobile — Part IV

Our fourth — and biggest — Salone del Mobile round-up of 2022 finishes up our overview of in-town presentations, with a few Rho Fiera stragglers and a whole lot of the neighborhood-based fair 5Vie, which launched in 2013 and is still going strong.
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Week of April 16, 2022

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week, a Vienna Secession–inspired editorial, a futuristic department store in Seoul, and a new Italian furniture featuring a who's who of international designers. 
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Week of July 26, 2021

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week is a bit different because in addition to our usual roll call of '80s-inspired interiors and incredible craft projects, we're featuring our favorite finds from this summer's design school degree shows, including hits from RISD, Beckmans, RCA, and the Kingston School of Art.
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Sight Unseen design gift guide

Two-Toned Vases and Velvet Body Pillows — The 2019 Sight Unseen Gift Guide, Part I

By now we've come to understand how hotly anticipated our annual gift guides are, so considering that it's after Thanksgiving, we'll cut to the chase: We did our gift guides a bit differently this year. In addition to our editor picks — today's by Jill — we asked our favorite designers and influencers to share their best gifts for giving and receiving, and over on Instagram, you'll have the chance to win four of the coolest items from each of our three guides.
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