The Best of Milan Design Week 2018, Part I

This year marked our tenth anniversary of attending the Salone del Mobile in Milan, and this year's fair felt a bit... different. The showrooms were more crowded (sometimes uncomfortably so), the brands were more lavish (Hermes's installation employing 150,000 Moroccan tiles rivaled only Flos's poured concrete last year in terms of sheer material costs), and the trends felt less obvious (we're living in such maximalist times that it can feel like all colors are suddenly trending at once). Here’s the first of our posts chronicling all the wonderful things we found.
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The Best Thing We Saw in Milan Today, Day 5

Created by the Berlin-based Studio Greiling for Kinnasand's Toyo Ito–designed Milan showroom, the STRUCTURES series uses powder-coated, architectural steel tubes to lift the Swedish textiles company's knotted or woven wool rugs to a new height, elevating the formerly flat surfaces into a new dimension: furniture.
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The Best Thing We Saw in Milan Today, Day 4

We’ve never seen any shame in a finish fetish, and at this week’s Milan fair the Amsterdam-based studio Odd Matter did the art movement proud with a project called Guise. Developed for a brand new contemporary/experimental arm of Nilufar Gallery called Far — which also had its official launch this week — Guise consists of three benches and a console made from carved foam that’s been coated in either iridescent car lacquer, or a classical faux-marble painting technique called Scagliola.
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The Best Thing We Saw in Milan Today, Day 3

In the 5Vie district, in an old flat that's been used for a couple of years as an exhibition space, we found the show Unsighted, curated by our friend Nicolas Bellevance-LeCompte of Carwan Gallery. For the brief he asked eight designers to create a collection not knowing who, what, or where it was bound for; our favorite of the collections was by a young designer named Roberto Sironi, who created Ruins, a series of benches, stools, mirrors and tables that juxtapose elements of the classical and industrial eras.
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The Best Thing We Saw in Milan Today, Day 2

One of the first projects we saw this week was a new collection by Bloc Studios, for which the Carrara-based studio collaborated with three of our favorite designers: Nick Ross, Valentina Camarenesi Sgroi, and Objects of Common Interest.
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The Best Thing We Saw in Milan Today, Day 1

Sight Unseen is on the ground at the Milan Furniture Fair this week and we’ll be bringing you loads of coverage next week! But until our rounds here are done, we’ll be featuring quick hits from some of our favorite things that caught our eye. First up, the brand-new lighting collection from Vancouver-based brand ANDLight, featuring new work by co-founders Lukas Peet and Caine Heintzman, and launching at Venture Future.
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Norwegian design in Milan — Norwegian Presence

The Norwegian Design Exhibition That’s On Our Must-Visit List

The annual Salone del Mobile is coming up sooner than we can believe, and one of the exhibitions we’re most excited for this year is Norwegian Presence. The fourth in a series of annual exhibitions put forth by Design and Architecture Norway (DOGA), Klubben (the Norwegian designers’ union), and Norwegian Crafts, this year's show is divided into three, with each part celebrating the country’s designers, craft artists, and manufacturers, respectively — essentially, every element of the country’s making community.
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The Best of the 2017 Milan Furniture Fair, Part I

When you're on the ground at the Milan Furniture Fair, things can seem like a total blur — you're walking miles a day, eating on the go, drinking too much wine, and seeing more new things than your brain can actually process at once. Which is why we love doing round-ups like these — organizing all of our favorite things into one (or two or three) places makes us realize just how great last week was, what trends are emerging (we're looking at you fringe, rust, lilac, and fiberglass) and what an interesting place design is at right now.
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We Already Can’t Wait For This Exhibition of Norwegian Designers in Milan

Where has a year gone? It feels like just yesterday we were swooning over the images from this stellar exhibition in Milan of Norwegian designers (and getting excited for our own inaugural show with some of those same talents). Now it's nearly Milan time again, and with it comes news of a brand new show of young Norwegians, this time curated by our friend Katrin Greiling under the umbrella "Everything is Connected."
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