Have you ever wondered how beds, desks and chairs land in an 800-room hotel? Or where major furniture brands spot new talent? Or how the likes of Jasper Morrison and Marc Newson became household names? Or even what trends mass-market furniture firms might try to follow? The answers can be found in Milan, every April, when the city’s design week, headlined by the vast furniture trade fair Salone del Mobile, takes place as the most influential industry gathering in the world.

On the Sunday evening before the 2025 edition kicks off, Monocle finds itself at a party on the edge of the city’s Chinatown district. In the throng of people jostling for a spot outside the bar, a young New York-based designer is talking to the head of communications for a major Italian design firm, while a Seoul-based writer for an interiors magazine shares a drink with an Australian architect.

The party hints at the activity that will take place over the next five days: there will be plenty of business but also moments when the industry’s brightest talents will rub shoulders with established stars, laying the foundations for new collaborations. It’s the week that sets the agenda for what our built environments will look and feel like in the coming decades, and Monocle is there for the duration.

Monday: big brands
For an Italian city, Milan can be secretive, with closed-off courtyards framed by wrought-iron gates. But for the duration of this week, the Milanese throw caution to the wind. The city’s palazzi and cortile are taken over by design brands showing their latest work in the most dramatic settings: a multistorey building in Porta Monforte becomes a showroom for Milan- and New York-based design retailer Artemest; the cloisters of the Santa Maria degli Angeli church play host to Italian furniture powerhouse Flexform’s outdoor range. Neither is usually open to the public. The ambition is for these settings to underscore the ability of a chair, sofa or table to shift our emotional landscape. It’s a demonstration of how product and architecture come together to influence a space’s mood.

A case in point is Dedar’s showcase at the refurbished Torre Velasca, built in the 1950s by the BBPR architecture partnership. It’s a structure that defines the city’s skyline. And it’s here that the Italian textile firm is showing a new fabric collection featuring the abstract weaving patterns of German artist and Bauhaus master Anni Albers, produced in collaboration with the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation.

“Torre Velasca is a symbol of the city and it inspired the installation in terms of its genius loci,” says Raffaele Fabrizio, Dedar’s co-owner, as he points to the BBPR-designed furniture dotted across the space. His sister and fellow co-owner Caterina Fabrizio agrees. “It’s the perfect place to celebrate this series by Anni Albers,” she says. “We want to share the beauty of the fabrics and the beauty of Milan.” By combining Albers’ modernist work with the setting of the mid-century Torre Velasca, Dedar achieves a kind of Milanese Bauhaus effect, bringing art and design into contact with the everyday. Here, visitors to the exhibition take photos of the graphic and colourful fabrics as much as they do the city’s skyline, Duomo and all.

It’s proof that the showcases are as much about the products on display as the atmospheres created. No one knows this better than Emiliano Salci and Britt Moran, who co-founded Milan-based interiors firm Dimorestudio in 2003. Over the past decade the practice has hosted some dramatic showcases, including a rationalist retrospective in 2021 and art deco apartment installations. “For us, Milan Design Week is more than a fair, it’s a collective moment of reflection on contemporary living,” says Salci. “Spaces are no longer just to be seen – they are to be felt, experienced.” 

This year the duo have created a 33-piece collection of fabrics for Kyoto-based textile manufacturing company Hosoo. Additionally, under the guise of Dimoremilano, the studio’s homeware label, Salci and Moran staged a cinematic installation of furniture that they designed for luxury fashion brand Loro Piana. Through a corridor clad in red velvet, visitors are led to a 1970s-inspired apartment where a more sinister backstory is insinuated by plates left shattered on the ground, the sound of a bathtub running over and a ringing phone going unanswered. The duo explain that such an installation is part of the transformation of the city into what they call an open-air laboratory. “Design moves beyond function and aesthetics to become something deeper, more sensory, more narrative,” says Moran. “It’s an opportunity to redefine the relationship between individuals and the environments they occupy.”

Tuesday: fair play
Salone del Mobile was born in 1961 when a group of furniture entrepreneurs decided to extol the values of Italian design. Cut to this year, at the fair’s 63rd edition, and more than 300,000 visitors are drawn to the Rho Fiera. More than 2,100 exhibitors from 37 countries welcome architects, developers and buyers looking for the latest products with which to furnish their projects. It is, in short, a business behemoth. “The numbers prove it,” says Maria Porro, the fair’s president. “A study we conducted with Politecnico di Milano showed Salone’s enormous economic and cultural impact.” She’s referencing a report that revealed the fair earned €275m for Milan in 2024. “It generates work and stimulates global creative industries.”

Despite this impressive bottom line, attendance is down by about 70,000 from the record-breaking numbers of 2024 and there are some absences in this year’s line-up of exhibitors, most notably a trio of Italian manufacturing stalwarts: Cassina, Flexform and Molteni stayed in the city. But other brands still see it as essential and new players are joining them. “It is important for us to be here to launch our outdoor collection – a new product category – and Salone helps you to tap into new and different distribution channels,” says Massimiliano Tosetto, director of Vicenza-based Lodes, which is participating in the fair for the first time since a rebrand in 2020. “Salone gives you international reach that you don’t get elsewhere.”

But perhaps the main advantage of the fair is its density. Where else can you grab a casual five minutes to talk about a sofa with Italian architect and creative director Piero Lissoni? Or get to meet Marva Griffin, the godmother of emerging designers? Monocle spots her strolling through the stalls of SaloneSatellite, the section of the fair she founded to promote the work of designers under the age of 35. “We don’t charge designers to participate, and this is important,” says Griffin. “Many exhibitions ask young creatives to pay. Instead, we give them a platform because talent deserves to be seen.”

Wednesday: emerging talent
Wednesday begins in the early hours of the morning at the celebrated Bar Basso. It’s a networking hotspot made famous in the 1990s by the likes of the young Jasper Morrison, Marc Newson and Konstantin Grcic, who caroused and conducted business here over negronis.

So, some hours later, nursing a slight hangover, Monocle takes the opportunity to explore off-piste. A number of hybrid showcases here walk the line between miniature furniture fairs and collective exhibitions that are more about exploring potential rather than commercial deals (that can come later). Leading the pack this year are Deoron, Convey and Capsule Plaza. The latter was born from design annual Capsule, and its third outing this year brings together brands and designers that blur the lines between interiors, architecture, beauty and technology. 

“We created Capsule Plaza as a bridge between creative communities,” says Milan-based publisher and editor Alessio Ascari, who established the magazine and curates the plaza with Rotterdam-based architect Paul Cournet. “You can feel this in the curation. We have presentations from brands, institutions and designers from different fields.”

Significantly, the showcase pairs lesser-known names with established players to great effect: Nike with musician-designer Bill Kouligas and creative director Niklas Bildstein Zaar; fashion brand Stone Island with bespoke hi-fi firm Friendly Pressure. “It’s a place of discovery and for looking at where creativity is going,” says Ascari. “This year we explored the future of the home. There’s food, with Georg Jensen running a gelato shop, and beauty and bathroom with Humanrace and USM, which is using its products for the first time to make a bathroom. It’s about beauty, craft and innovation.”

Thursday: fashionable takes
Monocle begins the morning by making a beeline for the press line ahead of a queue that stretches more than 100 metres around a block in the Porta Genova district. We’re outside a nightclub-like space but nobody is here to dance. Instead, we’ve pulled up to see an exhibition of an exclusive new collaboration between the archive of Charlotte Perriand and French fashion house Saint Laurent.

Unlike the fashion world, the names behind the best sofas, chairs and glassware rarely adorn billboards or capture headlines. But the presence here of brands such as Dolce & Gabbana, Fendi, Armani, Loewe and Hermès, which all show their own furniture and homeware, suggests a changing narrative. The number of people prepared to queue for fashion-led showcases hints at the role luxury houses are playing in drawing new crowds. In line to see Saint Laurent’s Perriand-designed bookcase, coffee table, armchairs and room divider are not developers in suits nor architects dressed in black, but a fashionable set.

Fashion brands are also helping to broaden the design discourse. Prada, in partnership with Italian design firm FormaFantasma, leads the way. Every year during Milan Design Week the luxury fashion house eschews releasing a design product in favour of hosting Prada Frames – a series of conversations about topics that relate to the wider design ecosystem, now in its fourth edition. This year the talks explored themes of infrastructure, mobility and global distribution. “Talking about infrastructure is about understanding the world we live in,” FormaFantasma’s co-founder Simone Farresin tells Monocle aboard Gio Ponti and Giulio Minoletti’s recently restored 1950s Arlecchino train, where the Prada Frames panels are held. “If we don’t talk, it means being unaware of why electricity or water runs through our homes.”

But it’s not all one-way traffic. For Renzo Rosso, Italian entrepreneur and president of the OTB Group of labels that includes Diesel, Maison Margiela and Jil Sander, it’s the fashion world that could learn from Milan Design Week. “Salone del Mobile is the best because everybody gets involved, every single shop hosts an event,” he says. “We need to work to achieve something similar in fashion. If Milan Fashion Week had a more open mentality, we could be even better than Paris.”

Friday: joy ride
As Monocle prepares to hit the road, it becomes apparent that car manufacturers are also in hot pursuit of the design industry. In 2025, Italian automobile manufacturer Maserati has joined forces with design company Giorgetti to unveil new vehicle interiors and a collection of low-slung armchairs, coffee tables and sofas that echo the sleek silhouettes of cars. Elsewhere, German automaker Audi presented its latest models in a Piazza Quadrilatero pavilion designed by Dutch firm Studio Drift.

Making its Milan Design Week debut was British car maker Range Rover, which took over the Palazzo Belgioioso with an installation designed in collaboration with California-based Nuova. “Futurespective: Connected Worlds” offers small groups of people a time-bending journey to a car dealership in 1970 – the year the Range Rover was launched. Visitors are then guided through a door into the present, where the fifth and latest electric-hybrid iteration of the Range Rover is presented.

“We love the 1970s because it’s an approachable decade with plenty of positivity and great art direction,” says Enrico Pietra, co-founder of Nuova. “We then use a cinematographic approach to set the mood.” Will Verity, Range Rover’s brand design chief, agrees. “We wanted to take people completely out of the fair and put them in a space where they can have time to reflect, which is also a reference to the calmness of moving through the world in a Range Rover,” he says. “For something like Milan Design Week, you can dial a concept up to 11.” What could have felt like a presentation at risk of choking on nostalgia, instead evokes a mood that is resolutely playful.

This lightness of being has been a common thread at this year’s Milan Design Week. The streets of Brera, the city’s bona fide design neighbourhood, brimmed with people. Brands prioritised creating effective showcases within architecturally significant spots. Exciting collaborations nurtured new talent and unexpected industry adjacencies, from vehicles to fashion, complementing the business-like nature of the fair. Provocation and unease were kept to a minimum despite the implications of US tariffs and talks of a luxury slowdown. And it was all toasted at late-night watering holes across the city.

---

Fine lines: Our picks of things to buy from Salone del Mobile

Developers, architects, buyers and gallerists descend on Milan Design Week to revel in novelty. All are on a mission to find the perfect chairs, tables, sofas and lamps to furnish their projects and showrooms with. Here’s our pick of the bunch.