Events
Every April, Milan becomes the world's most important conversation about space, form, and material. This year, we were there — and brought back more questions than answers.
There is a particular kind of exhaustion that only Salone del Mobile produces. Not the exhaustion of boredom, but of overstimulation — of too many rooms, too many ideas, too many possibilities arriving at once.
We arrived in Milan on a Tuesday. By Wednesday afternoon, we had already filled three notebooks.
The official programme is, in many ways, a distraction. The real conversations happen in the corridors of Palazzo Isimbardi, at a dinner in Navigli, in the back of a taxi between Tortona and the Fiera. Salone is a city-wide event disguised as a trade fair.
This year, the dominant theme was restraint. After years of maximalism and hyper-material excess, the most compelling stands were the quietest ones. Raw plaster. Unlacquered wood. Concrete that looked like it had been poured yesterday and left to decide for itself what it wanted to be.
First: the confidence to let materials age. Too much of what we see in German residential work is sealed, protected, preserved against time. Milan reminded us that time is not the enemy of a good interior — it is one of its most important collaborators.
Second: the conversation between indoors and outdoors. Several installations at Fuorisalone dissolved the threshold between a room and a garden in ways that felt genuinely new. Not the usual glass wall, but something more porous, more negotiated.
Third: patience. The studios whose work stopped us in our tracks were not the ones trying to say everything at once. They had chosen one thing — a joint detail, a proportion, a specific quality of reflected light — and committed to it completely.
We will be back in 2027. And we are already thinking about what to bring.