The hubbub is over and the world’s top tastemakers are back in the studio after another Milan Design Week with plenty of ‘wow’ moments. 

The design festival has two parts, the Milan Salone del Mobile, launched in Milan in 1961 to promote Italian furniture and accessory exports, and the more experimental and conceptual Fuorisalone, which this year explored the interface between creativity and AI.

For the legions of interior designers and fashion insiders who made the pilgrimage this year to Milan, the interface between their customers and the latest trends would have been more pressing. The week’s unerring ability to signal what is to come is why it remains the world’s leading event in the furnishing and design sector.  

Insides on the outside

The Pompidou Centre in Paris opened in 1977 to a firestorm of controversy due to its radical ‘inside out’ design. These days it is loved by Parisians and visitors as much as the Eiffel Tower or Louvre, and it continues to inspire designers with its determination to make the invisible visible.

That inspo was on show throughout Milan Design Week, in particular at the biennial Euroluce lighting exhibition. Insides were outside, on display and flaunted, such as with Bamboo Assemblage n.1 by Eugenio Rossi and Yaazd Contractor at Gucci’s Bamboo Encounters.

Fluid Dynamics, by French designer Théophile Blandet, melded sustainability, medical waste and a dark whimsy to create a series of lighting objects dimmed or brightened by “injecting” light through high-tech, single-use syringes.

This embracing of imperfection and messiness is nothing new for the kintsugi craftspeople of Japan, who for four centuries have used gold to highlight rather than hide repairs to ceramic pieces. 

Lifestyle brand Supermama put its own contemporary spin on the process for Milan Design Week with Kintsugi 2.0, with its designers using gold-plated 3D-printed resin to reconstruct pizza-slice pieces of broken plates and bowls.

So look for a wave of messy deconstruction flowing through interior design lookbooks as Milan continues the retreat from minimalism so clear in April 2024.

Wood gets naked

High-gloss finishes and distressed dressers are out and bare brown wood is in. Again. The trend was part of a broader swing towards appreciation of artisan culture in all its forms.

Velazquez, by Herzog & de Meuron for Marta Sala Éditions Milano, turned the humble side table into an intricate sculpture that celebrates rather than masks the grains and patterns inherent in nature’s ultimate building material. And Grandma’s dining room is brought right into the apartment of today with the bare-wood chair and wooden cabinet from VeeCollect's latest collection.  

It’s only natural

Another trend to benefit bare wood was an even more overt embracing of nature’s shapes, patterns and ‘wild side’. Surely only nature could create the essential fragility captured in Maximilian Marchesani’s Famiglia chandelier, composed of Harry Lauder’s walking stick branches (Corylus Avellana Contorta) and parrot feathers (Psittacula Krameri), all collected in the Palestro Gardens in Milan.  

Still happy to deploy technology to capture nature’s essence, Misha Kahn’s Euphausiids Delight (Final Moments), presented by Friedman Benda, used 3D printing, resin and automotive paints to create a colour-riot dining table straight from Neptune’s parlour.