The Monocle Minute
On Design

Milan Design Week and Salone del Mobile are up and running and there’s plenty to catch the eye. Monocle’s team is on the ground with the best and the brightest from the week where the design world stands still to be recognised, including a modular Japanese house made of upcycled materials and Porro’s centenary celebrations. We also take a box seat for Hermès’s homeware collection, sit down with 6:AM Glassworks’ co-founder Francesco Palù and gather round Nikari’s sleek new meeting table. Kicking off the grand tour is our design editor, Nic Monisse.

“You were conceived in a bed that was designed and probably born in one too,” Marva Griffin cheekily reminded me ahead of this year’s Milan Design Week, which is currently in full swing. “Design is really the oldest industry in the world because everything has been designed. I always say that good design is simple: for a better life. That is all.”

The design scion’s saucy reminder of my start to life was a helpful jumping-off point for my coverage of this year’s Salone del Mobile, the headline event of Milan Design Week. With more than 2,000 exhibitors showcasing their latest designs at the Rho Fiera trade hall and hundreds more events taking place across the city, it can be challenging to find ways to cut through the noise. But through Griffin’s lens, I have been inspired to seek out products and design approaches that might, indeed, encourage a better life.

Among the projects shown are sleek new cameras by Japanese brand Sigma, aimed at making it easier to document the world around us. Also featured were upcycled furniture and homeware made in partnership with Muji (see below) that offer reduced environmental impact without the “hippy” look so often associated with repurposed furniture. Not to mention SaloneSatellite (pictured), which is dedicated to spotlighting up and coming talents under 35. This year that includes young designers who addressed various challenges stemming from material supply to ergonomics. They include Alexander Schul and Lukas Lüttgen (both pictured, Lüttgen on left), the founders of Köln-based Kosmoform.

From interrogating these works, a theme soon emerged. Products, at least for me, that encouraged a good life were rooted in serving the user and making their lives more comfortable. This, of course, comes with an important caveat – that comfort cannot be confused with laziness. When visiting the US furniture giant Knoll’s booth at the Rho Fiera trade hall, designer Willo Perron pointed out that while his chairs are perfect for lounging on, they’re far from the living-room equivalent of cotton-polyester track pants (which some might find comfortable). “It’s more like cashmere.”

It’s a declaration that, for me, sums up what designers, from developers to architects, should be attempting to achieve in their work – and what everyday punters should be looking for. The best works of design – whether a sofa, a home or even the bed you were conceived in – are uncompromising in their quality while putting service of their people at their core.

Nic Monisse is Monocle’s design editor. For more on Milan Design Week, pick up a copy of Monocle’s ‘Salone del Mobile Special’ – a newspaper covering the world’s biggest design event and beyond.

Can upcycling be made to feel sophisticated? Japanese design powerhouse Muji certainly thinks so. For Milan Design Week, it tasked Paris-based Studio 5.5 – co-founded by Jean-Sébastien Blanc, Claire Renard and two others – with creating a modular house in the city’s Brera neighbourhood. The six-part structure (entrance, studio, bedroom, kitchen, bathroom and garden) is made from materials that are both visually appealing and eco-friendly: plywood for the structure; corrugated steel for the roof; recycled textiles for insulation. It can also easily be moved or extended over time to suit evolving lifestyles.

The house makes clever use of limited interior space. Its walls and ceiling are made from steel grids, attached with S-hooks to maximise storage. Outside, the roof is slanted to collect rainwater that is then used to irrigate the edible Japanese plants lining the garden module’s trellises. Studio 5.5’s attention to detail continues through a line of home accessories, 12 of them made from repurposed Muji products: a coat rack assembled from a bin lid and two soap-pump bottles; or a birdhouse made using a steel bookend and wooden drawer. Assembly instructions are available in an adjacent exhibition and on Muji’s website, enabling everyone to try their hand at creating their own objects from preloved items. “It’s a reminder that, rather than extracting new materials, we can create new things from existing ones,” says Renard.

While the project is described as a “Manifesto House”, enquiries from enthusiastic customers are already prompting the designers to consider commercial possibilities. “It’s a dream but an achievable one,” Blanc tells The Monocle Minute on Design. “It’s inexpensive, small and shows how we can live both responsibly and happily.”
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Visit Muji & Studio 5.5 during Milan Design Week at Corso Garibaldi 89.

Moscapartners always offers up an interesting mix during Milan Design Week – and this year is no different. The design-event organiser’s showcase returns to the historic Palazzo Litta for the first time since 2021, something that co-founder Caterina Mosca tells The Monocle Minute on Design is “like returning home”. Exhibitors include Bangladesh’s Fico, with its modern take on intricate Jamdani textiles, and Japanese design lab Honoka’s efforts to turn water-cooler bottles into everything from architectural bricks to stools and vases.

The migration-themed Variations show is anchored by an outdoor, site-specific installation by South Korean architect Byoung Soo Cho called “Nobody Owns the Land: Earth, Forest, Mahk”. Found in the palazzo’s central courtyard, this is the first presentation of Cho’s work in Europe. The main piece is a raised platform covered with ground stone from Verona on which people are invited to come together, walk barefoot and connect with the red earth. “We want people to lie down and feel the earth on their body, looking through the square of Palazzo Litta,” says Cho. “Instead of expressing a lot, the idea is to stay minimal and humble.”
Visit ‘Variations’ during Milan Design Week at Palazzo Litta, Corso Magenta 24.

Hermès has delved into its box of tricks for its showcase at this year’s Milan Design Week, which returns to the vast La Pelota Jai Alai exhibition centre on Via Palermo. The French house suspended a range of large all-white boxes in the space to house the label’s new, artfully crafted homeware collection. The idea was to highlight the box as the origin of every design idea. Some of the boxes are moulded, others have small windows cut out of their surfaces – all lend the space a serene, calming air.

Guests can peek in and around the displays – in some instances they’re able to step inside the boxes to take a closer look at the goods: including a set of Doublé d’Hermès mouth-blown glass vases and striped cashmere throws that are spun, dyed and woven by hand. Other pieces were crafted in collaboration with specialist artisans from around the world: such as a cord-and-linen embroidered rug featuring playful dot patterns by Italian artist Gianpaolo Pagni; and a series of side tables by Tomás Alonso crafted with Japanese cedar and colourful lacquered glass. But what really stood out was the consistently high quality of the objects, all while keeping things fun with bold material contrasts and mood-boosting colour palettes. Hermès raises the bar every year.
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Visit Hermès during Milan Design Week at La Pelota Jai Alai, Via Palermo 10.

The Milan-based 6:AM Glassworks puts a contemporary twist on traditional Murano glassmaking. Ranging from “sfumato” vases, which feature a painting style that creates a smoky finish, to chunky chandeliers, the studio’s pieces always offer a fresh take on time-proven techniques. Its debut solo exhibition, “Two-Fold Silence” – which is featured in Monocle’s Salone del Mobile newspaper – is currently on at the former public washrooms at Milan’s Cozzi swimming pool. 6:AM Glassworks’ co-founder Francesco Palù (pictured, on right, with co-founder Edoardo Pandolfo) tells us more.

How are you reinterpreting traditional glassmaking?
Most of our pieces are inspired by the lighting systems made in Murano from the beginning of the 20th century to the 1970s. At the beginning of that period, there was no plastic so they had to create modular lighting systems for public spaces using glass. We try to integrate new things such as LED lighting, and make the structure of the lamps cleaner and softer, without decoration.

Your studio has been involved in group exhibitions in the past but ‘Two-Fold Silence’ is its first solo show. Why did you decide to go it alone now?
After years of developing things, including for other architects, we had a big enough archive to finally do a show in which we can display three different lines of lighting system and the work we did behind the scenes.

Give us an idea of the range of pieces you have on show.
When we create a new collection, we start with references and drawings from the past. We love to start with something that already exists and try to give it a new life. We also have some objects that are a bit improvised, including some of the pieces in the Cozzi showers. Here we are more impulsive and we create mock-ups with things that we see in Murano, such as glass canes. We try to figure out a way to use them, not just as decorative hand-blown pieces but as they are. For example, we have a blue light that has glass canes inside. These things are not [traditionally] meant to finish as a light itself; they are meant to be integrated into a hand-blown piece. We like to play with things that people don’t usually see as a product.

What do you have coming up?
We want to work more on creating real architecture in glass. That’s the next step that we want to achieve. We are also studying a system to create pavilions with recovered glass from the façades of buildings. Our goal is to reach a new scale and start to work bigger. I’m an architect by training and, while I like doing objects and design, I’m missing larger-scale construction.

For more from Milan Design Week, tune in to this week’s episode of ‘Monocle On Design’.

Italian design company Porro is celebrating its centenary at this year’s Salone del Mobile with a sizable booth that houses new designs and familiar products. Along for the ride are the brand’s collaborators, including Paris-based designer Christophe Pillet and Milanese firm Dordoni Studio. Italian architect Piero Lissoni is also present with two new designs: the industrial Tablo table (pictured below) and the Biscuit sofa.

The horizontal silhouette and stained brown-ash panels makes the latter an inviting proposition. “In my mind, the wooden boundaries represent the wafers and the cushions are chocolate or cream,” Lissoni (pictured above) tells The Monocle Minute On Design. “You have to put your heart into simple design. Simplicity is my code, my language and my voice.”
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Visit Porro at Salone del Mobile. Hall 11, Stand D-15-E18.

Finnish furniture firm Nikari, known for its fine woodworking and cabinetmaking, is getting down to business in Milan this year. In addition to presenting a wide range of its existing collection, the brand is using the trade halls of the Rho Fiera to present a new meeting table – or at least newish. The versatile Linea KVP11 designed by Nikari’s founder, Kari Virtanen, has been reissued.

In typically understated Finnish fashion, the sleek timber table can feature custom openings that allow for the concealing of cables and wires from projectors, conference phones and computers. Its clean lines also make it appropriate to pair with a wide range of chairs. Perhaps most significantly, the modular table can also be configured to client specifications thanks to the fact that it’s made from a kit of parts, making it a natural partner for almost any meeting room.
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Visit Nikari at Salone del Mobile. Hall 22, Stand B16.