The Best of Milan’s Surreal Exhibition of New Designers, According to Dwell’s Editor-in-Chief

Sometimes we joke that it’s the "Superbowl of furniture design" or "South by Southwest for chairs," but more people attend Milan’s annual design week, anchored by the venerable trade show Salone del Mobile, than attend either of those events. Last year, "Salone" alone drew 307,000 visitors, increasing the population of the city of 1.3 million inhabitants by roughly one third. For one week, Milan becomes the best place to discover the trends and ideas in furniture design from all over the world that will be coming to your living room soon.

Alcova, the massive show dedicated to emerging design talent, is always something of a scavenger hunt. Founder/curators Valentina Ciuffi and Joseph Grima always stage the six-year-old exhibition, which made its stateside debut in Miami last year, in unusual and impressive locations, filling them with objects by dozens of emerging designers. It’s a lot of new work to take in, but your reward is finding a few gems by designers you didn’t know.

This year is no exception. About 45 minutes north of Milan in a town called Varedo, Alcova has taken over two very different but equally jaw dropping locations. The first is a beautifully decrepit villa dating back to the 16th century built by the prominent Milanese Bagatti Valsecci family (Side note: Their eccentric palazzo in town is one of the best, weirdest house museums on earth) complete with peeling plaster and pockmarked frescoes. The other is the Villa Borsani, the former home of architect Osvaldo Borsani, built in the early 1940s and now perfectly preserved as a museum. The dreamy locations were fitting. There was very little of the tired Memphis-inspired aesthetic that we’ve seen so much of in the last decade, and instead the best work has a surrealist slant, playing with strange materials and a sense of the uncanny.

Early on a Sunday morning, photographer Olga Mai and I headed north of Milan to see it all. Here are some highlights from the show, which runs through April 21.