Six favourite highlights and trends from Milan Design Week 2018

I’ve shared my top ten furniture launches from Milan’s Salone del Mobile 2018, now it’s time to look to the rest of the city and all that Milan Design Week 2018 had to offer. It was my first time experiencing the event, so I can’t compare it to previous years, but let’s just say it was on a whole different scale to events such as London Design Festival and Stockholm Furniture Fair that I’m used to!

Milan Design Week is big, bold and beautiful, the city buzzing with design shows, exhibitions, open-houses, installations, cocktails and parties – with everyone running around, a bit like headless chickens, desperately trying to fit everything into a few action-packed days and get that unique snap no-one else has got yet. Sometimes it can feel a bit relentless, and just a little exhausting, but it’s brimming with inspiration to take home and last you until next year.

The very best bit about Milan Design Week 2018 was getting access into all sorts of secret spaces that you would never normally get to go into – lush green courtyards, grand, ornate palazzos and even Vogue Italia’s offices. As much as the new, contemporary furniture designs on show, it was the architecture and settings that really made you go ‘wow!’. Here I’ve rounded up six of my favourite highlights from the week, from showcases of Scandinavian furniture in imposing, richly-gilded spaces, to understated, independent galleries away from the crowds and off the beaten track.

Main image above, courtesy Gubi

I don’t usually like to pay too much attention to trends – I don’t think we should be slaves to fashions or rules, rather design for our own personal expression – but I thought it might be useful, as well as these pretty pictures, to pull out a few takeaways from Milan Design Week 2018. The annual event has such a huge impact on the design industry and everything we’ll see coming out of it, even on the high street, in the next year or so, that it’s worth having one eye on the movers and shakers.

Here’s a quick, rough list of the trends I saw at Milan Design Week 2018, which you may spot in the images through the rest of this blog post:

– Curved forms – round, bulbous chairs, modular, sinuous-shaped sofas in pale velvet and cocooning, padded headboards for beds
– Multifunctional designs that the user can adapt easily for the home and the office
– Beautifully crafted wooden armchairs instead of plastic shell chairs
– New neutrals – warmer hues of beige, pale yellow, mustard, mint green and dusty pink. The combination of pink and yellow was particularly prominent
– Mainly just a lot of pink
– Thin, powder-coated metal – minimal, modular, free-standing shelving systems and slender, gently tapered legs on furniture
– Nostalgia for Seventies influences – curved furniture, retro shapes, clashing patterns, bright orange hues
– Bright pops of ultramarine blue
– Also bright pops of sunshine yellow
– The use of forest green and moss green to reference nature – especially stained wooden furniture, metal side tables and accessories
– Dark wood furniture – beautiful walnut designs give a more grown-up, timeless appeal
– Richly veined marble – round marble coffee and dining tables with thin tops and chunky bases
– Huge bunches and vases of wild foliage, which look like they’ve been freshly picked from the garden
– Big displays of lemons and limes in bowls, if you’ve got a lemon tree in your lounge even better!

And now for my highlights! 

Open Sky by COS x Phillip K. Smith III
Fashion brand COS collaborated with Palm Springs-based artist Phillip K. Smith III to create Open Sky, a large-scale mirrored installation in Palazzo Isimbardi – that seemed made for the selfie, Instagram-loving generation. Inspired by the square of sky above the palazzo’s courtyard, Open Sky used a faceted, reflective surface to bounce reflections of the surrounding 16th architecture, and the moving visitor, around the space. The uniform windows and colonnade appeared fractured and reconfigured into a dozens of skewed pieces, while people became fascinated with their own reflection, seeking out the perfect portrait.

‘My work is inspired by the constant shifts in light, colour and form that are presented in the natural and built environment,’ said Phillip K. Smith III. ‘The specific site conditions of the Palazzo Isimbardi afforded me an opportunity to reframe the historic architecture while meshing it with the enveloping beauty of the Milanese sky. While the installation will certainly create an overall shared group experience, each person will also leave the Palazzo with their own unique experience… unique to the time of day, to the specifics of the sky at that moment, and dependent entirely on their path of experience.’

Vogue Italia
One of my absolute highlights was getting a peek behind the scenes in Vogue Italia’s offices. The high-fashion magazine tasked eight international designers with transforming and reimagining the rooms of the editorial staff. The hugely varying spaces played with the blurring lines between work, home, life and play, presenting the office as not just a place to work, but as a space to foster creativity, inspire and push boundaries.

British designer Faye Toogood took on the editor-in-chief’s office, decorating the plain walls with rough canvases, hand-painted with silhouettes and faces to reflect the shift of the magazine’s editorship from female to male. Her Roly Poly collection of furniture in soft, creamy colours gave the room a warm, inviting, cocooning feel. Elsewhere, Milan-based architecture practice Quincoces-Dragò – founded by David Lopez Quincoces and Fanny Bauer Grung – created a meeting room inspired by the Milanese style that fuses classic and eclectic contemporary influences. Timeless pieces by Pierre Jeanneret sat next to new designs from the city’s most fashionable galleries.

Gubi at Palazzo Serbelloni
Danish design brand Gubi had the stand-out show of Milan Design Week 2018. Spread across a series of interlinking rooms at the grand, ostentatiously ornate Palazzo Serbelloni, it was their only international showcase of the year, and they went big – embracing the ancient splendour of the place with sumptuous room scenes, elegant furniture sets, wild floral displays and lemon trees.

For Milan Design Week they unveiled a number of new designs, some by young design studios, others reissued classics from notable mid-century designers. New pieces to mention include GamFratesi’s new Bat Collection with its simple, sweeping curves and a sculptural, cocooning bed by Space Copenhagen. Embracing the Seventies trend, Gubi has also brought Pierre Paulin’s Pacha Chair back into production – originally designed 1975, it’s a bulbous, organic-shaped design that sits very low on the ground without legs.

Six Gallery
A little off the beaten track and away from the swarming crowds, Six Gallery was my favourite find – a new, understated creative space hidden down a quiet street to the south-west of the city, it’s a collaboration between architects Quincoces-Dragò, Mauro Orlandelli, art director Samuele Savio, musicians Sergio Carnevale and Nic Cester and landscape architect Irene Cuzzaniti. Spanning off a verdant courtyard, you’ll find an exhibition space as well as an intimate restaurant and cafe.

Within the raw, industrial setting of black painted brick, Quincoces-Dragò showcased their first furniture collection. Inspired by the colours and hues of the American desert, the 18-piece range includes marble tables and benches, walnut wood armchairs and brass lighting. With a focus on natural materials and the pairing of textures, the practice describes the collection as ‘conveying refinement through simplicity’.

The calm, tranquil space was completed by a canopy of some 38,000 ears of corn floating from the ceiling.

HAY at Palazzo Clerici
And onto another stunning palazzo – this time Danish brand Hay, who collaborated with Sonos and WeWork to explore better experiences for everyday life in the historical Palazzo Clerici in the heart of the city. The juxtaposition of old and new surprised and delighted – simple plastic chairs were placed in gold, gilded rooms, mundane kitchen objects and utensils arranged in grand Milanese kitchens.

Key pieces to note include the Bernard chair by Shane Schneck, an easy chair with a chunky solid oak frame and leather or canvas seat; the Bouroullec brothers’ clean and minimal Elementaire chair; and the Silhouette sofa by GamFratesi, a simple design characterised by the smooth curve of its back.

For the simple everyday home, there was also the launch of Hay’s Kitchen Market, a collection of useful essentials curated by Mette Hay together with Danish chef Frederik Bille Brahe. The marbled enamelled plates, Moroccan glasses and pink plates are sure to be popular.

If you like your tech colourful instead of boring and black, then you’ll love Hay’s collaboration with Sonos. The limited edition collection comes in three colours – red, green and yellow.

‘Sound plays such an important part in architecture and the experience of life at home, yet we hadn’t found speakers we were happy to have in our home until we discovered Sonos,’ says Mette Hay. ‘For me, colour is one of the most important tools in the design process, and it was very important we didn’t just create a colour scale that looked beautiful. These speakers deserve to be treated like furniture; strong, independent objects that can blend in or stand out – functional accessories for any room that fit different needs and different spaces.’

Hemma: Stories of home
Brera Design District provided a cluster of small-scale exhibitions and showroom spaces within easy distance from one another. It was no surprise that I loved the Swedes’ contribution – Hemma: Stories of home, that brought together a curated selection of Swedish brands and designers who all share an ambition to improve the lifestyles of the individual and the community with functional design.

The exhibition was designed by interior architectural studio Joyn and organised by Swedish Design Moves, a government initiative to increase international awareness of Swedish design. The focus was on quality, sustainability and the usability of the products around us – showing the Nordic countries still hold respect for good quality design for the many.

The light-filled series of spaces were brought to life with an on-trend mix of rich mustard colours, pale yellows and pastel pinks. The feel was simple and calm, but with a warmth and uplifting vibrance to it, showing that Swedish design doesn’t just equal cool, white minimalism. I loved the mix of natural materials – leather, velvet and wood – that gave a tactile quality to the scenes.

I hope you enjoyed my round-up and congrats if you got to the end of this loooong post!! It was such an inspiring week, which introduced me to new brands, emerging designers and exciting names. I’ll have a few more blog posts coming out over the next few weeks, so keep an eye out for more design inspiration that can be translated into the everyday home.

All images Cate St Hill unless otherwise specified