It’s Furniture Design’s Big Week. Here’s What We Saw During Salone del Mobile

Our editors sorted through thousands of chairs and countless other objects during Milan’s design week to spot the trends and ideas that might be taking up residence in your living room soon.

Apr 19, 2023 - 01:51
It’s Furniture Design’s Big Week. Here’s What We Saw During Salone del Mobile

Our editors sorted through thousands of chairs and countless other objects during Milan’s design week to spot the trends and ideas that might be taking up residence in your living room soon.

To call Salone del Mobile a furniture trade show is like calling the Super Bowl a football game. And the crowd is bigger. The huge event, now back on its annual cadence, stretches over a campus of cavernous halls and draws hundreds of thousands of visitors. (To give a sense of scale, roughly 386,000 people visited in 2019… the population of Milan is around 1.3 million.)

But in addition to Salone, dozens of exhibitions also pop up in showrooms, studios, and temporary venues all over town, with everyone from tech companies (Google, Microsoft) to fashion brands (Louis Vuitton, Loewe, Issey Miyake) also creating often-elaborate presentations.

So how do you sort through it all and figure out which of these furnishings might eventually make its way into your living room? We sent three of our editors to cover a lot of ground (we stopped counting steps long ago) to separate the brilliant from the bland and the awesome from the awful. These are their personal picks for best in show.

Day 2: William Hanley, editor-in-chief

(Scroll down for day-one coverage from style editor Julia Stevens)

I'm an arch minimalist, but one who is easily seduced by the strange and the surreal—my ideal sofa is a concrete slab with a fun throw pillow if that gives you any idea.

Editor-in-chief William Hanley on day two of the fair.

After a couple of quiet years, the manufactured mania that stirs up around the design crowd when they swarm Milan seems to be back to pre-pandemic levels—with everyone buzzing breathlessly about jammed schedules and must-see shows. I’m no exception. It’s the end of the day on Monday, and I can’t believe it’s only Monday.

Today was all about legends and discoveries—checking big names off of the list and finding people you’ve never heard of. Here’s what happened.

First Stop: Via Durini and Thereabouts

Name a heritage furniture brand from Europe or elsewhere, and the odds are excellent that they have a showroom in Milan and that it could be on or near Via Durini, a strip in the city’s busy shopping district near the San Babila metro stop. For the first half of the day, Karim (who shot these photographs) and I zigzagged our way through the neighborhood to see what’s new from the names you know.
First up, Flos. Let’s talk about track lighting. How do you make a pretty pedestrian and often maligned source of overhead illumination exciting? Walking into the Italian lighting giant’s showroom, that wasn't clear. In the center of the space, a stage was set up with props like a neutral-colored kitchen table and bookshelves, while dancers wearing monochrome workwear pantomimed various domestic scenes—reading, doing yoga, taking a polaroid of a friend—in slow motion. Someone watching pointed up, and sure enough, track lighting. Exciting track lighting. The prolific London designer Michael Anastassiades’s latest for Flos is a system of tracks from which you can hang a set of five pendant fixtures designed to be moved around a space depending on how you want to use them. The idea is to make open-plan areas more defined for when you’re, say, doing a headstand as one dancer demonstrated, or working from home, without compromising on flexibility. Just scoot a light along when you’re on to the next activity.

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