Home Milan Design Week
04.09.19

Fair Report

The Best Thing We Saw in Milan Today, Day 1

One of the first projects we saw this week was a new collection by Bloc Studios, for which the Carrara-based studio collaborated with three of our favorite designers: Odd Matter, Federica Elmo, and Studiopepe, whose collection in
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04.04.19

Sighted

Milan Preview: New Lighting — And the Cutest Café — By Lambert & Fils

At Salone every other year, a special portion of the fair is devoted to Euroluce, aka all the lighting brands you can cram into one (or two) pavilions. But this year, one of our favorite lighting brands is debuting its new collections miles away from the fairgrounds of Milan: Next week, the Montréal-based Lambert & Fils will pop up with a six-day concept café at Alcova, a former panettone factory in the northeast corner of the city.
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03.28.19

Eye Candy

Milan Preview: Jorge Penadés’ Aquatic-Inspired Aluminum Vases

Jorge Penadés has been popping up on our radar a lot lately, and the Spanish designer’s latest move is a collaboration with the manufacturer BD Barcelona, a furniture brand known for its extensive design catalogue and pioneering technology in aluminum extrusion dating all the way back to the 1970s. Entitled Piscis, the six different vases are made from extruded aluminum profiles, converted from the offcuts of old tables and shelves (including those by Konstantin Grcic) produced over the last 50 years in BD Barcelona's factory.
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03.21.19

Sighted

Preview Studiopepe’s Immersive Installation For the 2019 Milan Fair, Inspired by Tarot Cards and Divination

Studiopepe's installation Club Unseen, at last year's Milan design week, was the perfect setting in which to experience design in the way it's meant to be experienced. Which is why we're excited to announce that during next month's fair, Studiopepe will stage a second presentation with the same immersive feel. Called Les Arcanistes, it will feature new ceramic tiles by Studiopepe for Bardelli, new colorways of the pair's Pastilles furniture for Tacchini, and lighting by one of our favorite brands, Areti, in a presentation exploring "the interplay between matter and divination."
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04.27.18

Fair Report

The Best of Milan Design Week 2018 — Part IV

In case you couldn't tell, we thought this year's Milan fair was a pretty great one, as evidenced by the fact that it's the fourth and final day of our coverage, and we're still featuring some of our favorite things we saw all week — Dimore Studio's enormous, flower-filled vitrine, Hay's takeover of Atelier Clerici with WeWork and Sonos, the outstanding Lina Bo Bardi show at Nilufar Depot, and Nov Gallery's iridescent barbells (above), among others.
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04.26.18

Fair Report

The Best of Milan Design Week 2018 — Part III

In the third of our posts chronicling our Milan design week finds, we're focusing on the Salone Satellite. It's definitely the most high-stakes event for us during each year's fair, the place where we either strike gold with a ton of new studio discoveries or feel let down by a lack of collections that really manage to turn our heads. The projects we did get excited about this year are catalogued below, and if we're lucky, the best of these names will continue to appear on this site for years to come.
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04.24.18

Fair Report

The Best of Milan Design Week 2018, Part I

This year marked our tenth anniversary of attending the Salone del Mobile in Milan, and this year's fair felt a bit... different. The showrooms were more crowded (sometimes uncomfortably so), the brands were more lavish (Hermes's installation employing 150,000 Moroccan tiles rivaled only Flos's poured concrete last year in terms of sheer material costs), and the trends felt less obvious (we're living in such maximalist times that it can feel like all colors are suddenly trending at once). Here’s the first of our posts chronicling all the wonderful things we found.
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04.23.18

Fair Report

The Best Thing We Saw in Milan Today, Day 5

Created by the Berlin-based Studio Greiling for Kinnasand's Toyo Ito–designed Milan showroom, the STRUCTURES series uses powder-coated, architectural steel tubes to lift the Swedish textiles company's knotted or woven wool rugs to a new height, elevating the formerly flat surfaces into a new dimension: furniture.
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04.20.18

Fair Report

The Best Thing We Saw in Milan Today, Day 4

We’ve never seen any shame in a finish fetish, and at this week’s Milan fair the Amsterdam-based studio Odd Matter did the art movement proud with a project called Guise. Developed for a brand new contemporary/experimental arm of Nilufar Gallery called Far — which also had its official launch this week — Guise consists of three benches and a console made from carved foam that’s been coated in either iridescent car lacquer, or a classical faux-marble painting technique called Scagliola.
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04.17.18

Fair Report

The Best Thing We Saw in Milan Today, Day 3

In the 5Vie district, in an old flat that's been used for a couple of years as an exhibition space, we found the show Unsighted, curated by our friend Nicolas Bellevance-LeCompte of Carwan Gallery. For the brief he asked eight designers to create a collection not knowing who, what, or where it was bound for; our favorite of the collections was by a young designer named Roberto Sironi, who created Ruins, a series of benches, stools, mirrors and tables that juxtapose elements of the classical and industrial eras.
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