The annual pilgrimage to Milan begins this weekend as the global design community gathers in Italy to see and be seen. Now in its 51st year, the Salone del Mobile at the Rho Fairgrounds will include Euroluce lighting (alternating every other year with EuroCucina/Bathrooms) and celebrating 20 years of Salone Satellite, it’s platform for emerging design talent. Throughout the city, large brands like BMW, Pepsi, Airbnb and IKEA will be producing bespoke exhibitions highlighting future concepts around the future of hospitality and the home. And the organizers behind the showcase of younger talent at Ventura Lambrate move their experimental sensibilities from the industrial outskirts of the city into an abandoned warehouse in Centrale. Ventura Centrale will exhibit more established designers like Lee Broom and Maarten Baas by Lensvelt. We’ll be on the ground covering the happenings but follow our Instagram stories for real time posts @thisismold.
The Future Sausage at Salone Satellite
Designer Carolien Niebling dives into the history sausage-making and proposes future food concepts through product collaborations with a texture laboratory, molecular chef and master butcher. Through pairings like insect pate in a wax casing and offal cuts with fruit jams, Niebling proposes alternatives to this beloved meat product. Salone Satellite, Milan Fairgrounds Rho.
Seletti x Studio Job
From the people who brought us Toilet Paper magazine’s homegoods, Seletti is launching a new line of pop-inspired homewares and furniture with the Belgian duo Studio Job. With Studio Job’s playful sensibilities and irreverant approach to mixing icons of craft and mass manufacture, the “Blow” collection will include neon lights, rugs, plates and mirrors that represent a new fast retail concept with icons of fast food. Additionally, Seletti will launch the “UN_Limited” collection, their first upholstered furniture line with a hotdog-shaped couch and hamburger-shaped armchair along with a mass-consumer version of Studio Job’s banana lamp. As Job Smeets conveys in the release, ““We went banana’s on Fast Food Furniture.” Seletti Flagship Store, Corso Garibaldi, 117.
The Serious About Food Kitchen Lab by KitchenAid at Triennale
At the Triennale Design Museum eights designers present their ideas for a future concept kitchen. Talent includes Bernhardt & Vella, Castiglia Associati, Kensaku Oshiro, Marc Sadler, matali crasset, Rachel Laxer, Tor Interiors and Victor Vasilev. Besides the Kitchen Lab, don’t miss the site-specific Honey Factory installation by Francesco Faccin, a self-contained educational hub outfitted with beehives and the equipment for harvesting and processing honey as well as the “Player’s Pflute,” a musical instrument derived from a vegetable, one of the finalists for this year’s Lexus Design Awards. Palazzo della Triennale.
I’m a Kombo Funeral Biscuits at Wallpaper* Handmade
The annual exhibition curated by the editors at Wallpaper* Magazine is a collaborative bonanza pairing manufacturers with designers to create one-off products around a specific theme. With Palm Sunday and Passover bookending this year’s Salone, the theme of “Holy Handmade!” staged in a former church on via della Moscova seems especially appropriate. Exploring the artifacts of ritual, symbols of the occult and “the sacred union of miraculous materials,” expect to see a paper sarcophagus by Tom Dixon and Paper Factory, Ten Commandments by Yves Behar and Funeral Biscuits by our friends I’m a Kombo and Anne Brandhøj. (Image above is stock photography.) Mediateca Santa Teresa, via della Moscova 28.
Studio Formafantasma for NUDE
Studio Formafantasma is launching the “Stained” collection with Turkish manufacturers NUDE glass. In keeping with their material explorations and storytelling practice, the “Stained” collection emphasizes the craft of mouth-blown glass through splashes of color. Palazzo Litta, Corso Magenta, 24.
Water Tower Pour Over at Form & Seek
Crafted using locally-harvested Georgia Kaolin clay, this coffee maker, cup and carafe, designers Eny Lee Parker and Levi Brandon Gordy highlight the ways we consume water as ritual, stating, “It is difficult for us to recognize and appreciate beauty in such a seemingly disposable commodity. Evidence of depletion is undeniable.” Their work will be exhibited along with 29 other designers at “Age of Man,” from Form & Seek in Ventura Lambrate.
Lunch Recipes at MINDCRAFT
Constrained by a “recipe” for her stoneware cookies, ceramicist Christina Schou Christensen’s “Lunch Recipes” are an experiment in glaze, poured over roughly shaped stoneware and spread with a spatula “like spreading cream cheese on a cracker,” the designer explains. This year’s show of Danish design is once again curated by the fashion designer Henrik Vibskov and highlights both interior objects and experiments in fashion.
Hungry for Design at Porta Romana
Joining the local dining scene with design, this new initiative will be featuring food trucks from 11AM-11PM daily alongside a curated exhibition of tableware and interior objects from an international roster of designers. Don’t miss the handmade pastas from Pasta Madre, part of the cadre of progressive Milanese restauranteurs advocating for farm-to-table sustainable agriculture. Above, dinner plates by illustrator Jean Jullien for Case Studyo. via Muratori 11, Porta Romana.
Have a tip for more Salone del Mobile Food Design projects? Leave a comment and we’ll see you in Milan!
