Not only design in the recap of the best seen at Milan Design Week 2023
There is the return of metal, new essential and portable lights, undergrowth with mushrooms and the sacred ritual of the aperitif. But without a synesthetic experience, those places don't exist.
If the design that produces, creates and suggests new gestures and needs is the direct projection of our lives, this is the place to find new interpretations useful for intercepting the coordinates of tomorrow. The Milan Design Week 2023 edition was full of ideas, meetings, trajectories. A return to normality, a gigantic furious and joyful happening that few have managed to avoid. So we gathered ideas, visited places and shot photos without stopping, marked names and reaffirmed certainties. The design and interior trends of the future are already here.
Scroll down to discover all the interior trends of Milan Design Week 2023
Light trend, technology rules
With Euroluce, new scenarios are opening up on which the lighting choices of future environments depend. Applied to private or public spaces, they define the driving narrative moods and atmospheres of the next secondary market. A great responsibility therefore, which is not afraid to break ties with more traditional styles. Ornamental and baroque lights give way to essential, direct shapes, above all functional to the technology that dominates them, thus defining them. And where a visual connection with the past is clear, it is good to remember that a clever use of micro technology is hidden. So let's start with Dreispitz, among the new lighting products from Artemide with the signature of Herzog & de Meuron. An industrial intelligence capable of adapting to different applications. Slender, it is a unique, poetic and timeless piece because it is modular and ideal for inventing luminous patterns thanks to the hypnotic trefoil section. The essential and minimalist trend can also be found in Black Flag by FLOS, designed by Konstantin Grcic . Enough and advance the cit. to the American punk group of the late 70s to immediately grasp its rebellious and unconventional soul. Extending 3.5 meters from the wall, it brings light to the heart of any space and, when folded, resembles a visually powerful elegant sculpture. Then there is AfterEight, born from FontanaArte 's link with artistic glass and the signature of Francesco Librizzi and Arian Brajkovic. “AfterEight is the time we allow for pleasure after duty. It's all that begins after sunset, the private part of the day in which we dedicate ourselves to what is most intimate for us". What else?
In the face of a marked essentiality, the tech evolution of light offers in return its tender side. Result? Trinitas from the Domus di Ginori 1735 collection and designed in collaboration with the designer Luca Nichetto , is based on the Renaissance conception of three becoming one, the foundation of universal beauty. Portable , rechargeable, it sees three elements of mouth-blown Venetian crystal glass by Barovier&Toso come together on a porcelain tray supported by a gold-plated semi-opaque metal arch. Tom Dixon also joins the soft-lighting trend, busy working on concepts of flexibility, modularity and unlimited possibilities assisted by robots. The PORTABLES editions arrive in the new CHOICE collection, highly compact and rechargeable lights - and 10 hours of autonomy - with a fluid cap in molten glass grafted onto a metal cone. Finally, the poetics of Ryuichi Kozeki for AMBIENTEC sees the glam part imported into the world of light. Xtal Gacrux is a table lamp that recalls one of the brightest stars in the Southern Cross constellation. Its crystal lampshade with an aluminum base is hand-carved with an original pattern that enriches it with new light refraction effects, just like for a jewel of the highest manufacture.
Scroll down to discover all the interior trends of Milan Design Week 2023
Armchairs and small armchairs, like the upholstered items seen at Milan Design Week 2023, envelop and welcome
Rounded, welcoming, round, maternal. This is the design trend for the upholstery department that is not afraid of appearing too romantic or childish. Rather instinctive, immediate, clear. Because from those armchairs we just want to be welcomed, protected, supported. Molteni&C suggests it with Cinnamon, the first project based on a design by Naoto Fukasawa . A synthesis that perfectly combines form, function and comfort: "the inspiration for Cinnamon comes from the sensation of being surrounded by a soft embrace or as if you were floating on a body of water, with your arms sliding on the surface" confirms the Japanese designer. Contained in a "plastic" shell in fiberglass covered in linen with a chenille weave, the T4 modular chairs by the Turkish company UMA OBJECTS they are visually satisfying because they recall worlds of a past covered in technicolor with sweet nostalgia, as well as being comfortable and welcoming armchairs. Created by the English studio Holloway Li, they represent the fun portion of any self-respecting eclectic cool living room. Finally elegant and casual, Ralik by Arper celebrates the fluidity of beauty with a family of chairs , poufs and benches from the modular system to be used as single units or combined with each other. And where green details can make the difference: the "L"-shaped legs are in fact in recycled polypropylene.
Scroll down to discover all the interior trends of Milan Design Week 2023
Understand a space thanks to a fragrance.
If it is true that experience generates memory, it is equally true that the inner world desperately needs to expand the expressive potential of an atmosphere with the only move left, the involvement of all the senses. Therefore it requires a synesthetic action. And after matter, colours and sound, why not embrace the universe of fragrances to complete the sensory journey of foreign worlds destined to immediately become intimate and personal? It is no coincidence that niche perfumery is having a huge mass response (will it manage to remain a niche?): the perception of a fragrance tickles the senses and the memory, traces very powerful evocative olfactory paths because in our heads they immediately real. At Alcova, the perfume brand Les Eaux Primordiales proposed a sensory installation to launch the latest essence, Cèdre SUPERFLUIDE, with a double wooden structure inspired by the smoking chimneys of French factories: the first to listen to the essences and the second with glass ampoules containing sculptures kurinuk i made by Natascia Fenoglio impregnated with perfume through a process close to sublimation. Moooi x EveryHuman is then the project that introduced a special machine controlled by artificial intelligence, Algorithmic Perfumery, designed to mix customized room fragrances through a creative and experimental test. Finally, Cloud is the synesthetic reinterpretation of the concept of chandelier wanted by the creative director of Lasvit Maxim Velčovský. Glass and optical fibre explore the connectivity of our complex world thanks also to an essence created ad hoc by perfumer Jakub F. Hiermann. At the center is Ambroxan, a molecule known for its marine and ozonic accords suitable for perfectly capturing the freshness and depth of the sky.
Scroll down to discover all the interior trends of Milan Design Week 2023
Because mushrooms are already our future
They've popped up everywhere. Beloved, magical, emblem of future possibilities and design alternatives, design chooses mushrooms and their extremely powerful mycelium, the underground vegetative apparatus formed by an intertwining of filaments called hyphae, to trigger not only new practices of designing and creating objects, but also to develop alternative concepts and materials. If fashion has already reached us , now design has definitively included it as an effective narrative topic. During DW23 social media went crazy for the mushrooms in Loewe 's interior project, for those of the Aliita jewellery brand which built an intimate, delicate and magical multipurpose project on the amanita that brings a revelation into the light from underground. But mushrooms are also the starting point of the collection of fantastic carpets by JOV with the scientific name M-SHWY, acronym of Mycorrhizal Super Highway, or the communication network with which mushrooms connect to each other up to extend an intelligent collaboration open to different species. The Dutch collective Dutch Invertuals includes mushrooms among the projects selected for Objects for a New Kind of Society: the way we work' with you, an exhibition in the Isola district generated by the reflection on how technology can influence future ways of working, very ways of working in increasingly less defined and decidedly more alienating environments. BarryLlewellyn proposed Synergy Lamps , a light source with organic shapes in tune with the natural flow of nature. Experimentation is also at the heart of the Human Mycorrhizae project curated by the startup Terracquea with Studio Cartier and Franco Stanghellini. The main element of the collection of products is the mycelium applied to various interior areas: from padding made of flowers, paper and leather obtained from mushrooms, to fabrics free of pesticides and fibres created from wild plants.
Symbioosa is the name of the lamps developed by LLEV for Lasvit for the first collection of lamps made of glass with a technology that uses mycelium as an active part. Each element of this series is also able to adjust its intensity by adapting to the rhythm of the natural daylight in each room. The glass cap comes from the cast of traces of mycelium grown on the sawdust of beech processing waste. Finally, Kim Eunha's project , although born out of a reflection on modern society and the value attributed to clothing seen as a container of memories and emotions, results in a restitution very close to nature (including mushrooms). Fluffy Tree Stump, presented at Re;collective, the upcycling exhibition of the Korean brand RE;CODE & DEKASEGI, is the stool and object made with clothes, labels, buttons, zippers sewn together on which small white mushrooms have grown.
The era of metals is back, welcome back chrome brutalism
An exhibition entitled "L'Era dei Metalli" celebrates the master Alessandro Mendini in Milan (until 20 May, ed) with over 55 works, some of which extraordinary unpublished, designed to investigate the metal soul of the Master, who passed away in 2019 , grappling with silver, enamel and copper, in a heartfelt homage to the Italian Futurists. But it is not an isolated case. There are many brands and companies that make the return to raw material the next brutalist aesthetic code. There is Cappellini, for example, which chooses to decline the new Vendicari outdoor armchair by Jangir Maddadi, available in solid blues, whites and terracotta reds, in a sincere metal limited edition of only 9 pieces. In the spaces of the Magazzini Raccordati under the platforms of the Central Station, the American architect and designer Sam Chermayeff exhibits and teases onlookers with the Beast series, highly chromated steel pieces with an unusual urban use. The cars parked in the location thus become, in addition to ideally offering here&there passages, mere supports for doing much more. Another surprise comes from LAUFEN. The Swiss company specializing in bathroom furnishings usually dealing with ceramics and glass, entrusts the NM3 trio with the interpretation of new modules with the idea of taking them beyond the bathroom environment. The LAUFENXNM3 capsule collection sees furnishings and accessories in stainless steel, the central material of the work of the young and highly regarded Milanese studio, created using simple metal carpentry processes. Also for this reason LAUFEN has chosen to portray the collection in the very elegant entrances of some buildings that are symbols of Milan's architecture in a beautiful city. to the famous volume Entryways of Milan (ed. Taschen) with the iconic shots of Delfino Sisto Legnani , one of the three founders of NM3. And then there's Alessi who calls the exhibition project at the Fuorisalone ARS METALLICA, a return to the origins of the Omegna workshop. And with Philippe Starck he proposes Poêle , in French pan, a collection of seats and accessories worked with the ancient technique of cold pressing of the metal, typical of the creation of steel pans. If the design of the Skol chair by Need Studio for INFINITI at first glance brings back memories of distant times, the 25 mm steel tube structure contrasts with the support of the seat and back thus defining a new, decisively more adult.
Scroll down to discover all the interior trends of Milan Design Week 2023
The return of the mobile bar at home, a magical casket with a high alcohol content
In each edition of the Salone del Mobile, a recurring theme emerges linked to the creation of a specific product on which the zealous brands focus to intercept a clearly certain collective habit of living. It may be due to the legacy left by the pandemic that has kept us sedentary in homes, but the ritual of the aperitif , of the relaxing drink, sometimes comforting but above all a coveted moment of placid sharing, has rekindled the spotlight on the legendary classic mobile bar, so popular in the 30s and 50s, faithful guardian of alcoholic liquids and equipped with armies of tumblers, flutes and cups. The cabinet bar is a casket ready to quench the thirst of expert tasters of long drinks and sour blends. We have seen them everywhere, modeled on sinuous shapes, declined in ingenious retractable mechanisms, or almost as enigmatic as sculptures on a base when closed. Bright and equipped with discreet technology, the designer bar cabinet is the next must-have addition to any wonderful home.
Scroll down to discover all the interior trends of Milan Design Week 2023
Red design, love always wins (but also courage, seduction, strength)
Passion, seduction, rage, adventure. But also energy, strength, vitality, courage, desire. A design piece in red is on the future wish list ready to brighten up any area of both private living and working spaces. In the hall, in the living room, in the bedroom. Intimate and seductive, noisy and centralizing, red is the shade that dresses the Kisss Chair , a tribute to Salvador Dalì's famous Mae West Lips sofa created by Marcel Wanders with MOOOI. Even Fabio Novembre for Driade reiterates a clear, ultra-pop concept to be projected onto the console called LOVE. And red passion, the marker colour chosen by Diesel to represent its rebellious identity, is also proudly applied to the iconic pieces of the new Living with Moroso collection. Here the red High Cloud armchair is the tallest and softest version of the collection of the same name, which only makes you want to test its undoubted persuasive qualities.
