What Does a Massive Furniture Show Say About the Future of Your Home?

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.

Julia Stevens, style editor

In a world full of beige sofas, I’ll be on the hunt for personality-filled pieces with some shock factor: the iridescent resin furniture of the world that makes you do a double take. It’s day one at Salone and the energy is electric. Here’s what I saw (and may never stop thinking about).

First Stop: The Bright Side of Design, Nilufar Depot

Poikilos Collection by Objects of Common Interest