SHOW AND TELL

With Milan Design Week now wrapped up, let’s take a look at the week that was. We start with a refreshing dip in 6AM Glassworks’ showcase at Città Studi’s Piscina Romano before we talk shop with industry stalwart and Interni magazine editor, Gilda Bojardi. Then: we strut our stuff among Sophie Lou Jacobsen’s Disco Aperitivo collection and take a roadtrip to Bologna. First, Nic Monisse reflects on a week of fast-paced fun.

Milan Design Week wrapped up today – an event that’s almost impossible to fully absorb. Across seven days, new furniture was launched, global project deals were struck and conversations about the future of design filled the Salone del Mobile fairground as well as the city’s showrooms, cafés, restaurants and bars. It was a collision of creativity and commerce which we unpack in this weekend’s special newsletter. Here are a few key takeaways from my week in the Lombard capital. 

Sunday
Landing at Linate first thing Sunday morning almost always makes you feel as if you’re behind the eight ball during Design Week. Thankfully my first appointment was with Sophie Lou Jacobsen at Disco Aperitivo (see “The Treat” below). The designer is renowned for looking at the importance of using well-designed objects to ground us in daily routines. “The point for me is to create something that is a little bit out of the norm,” says Jacobsen. “When people are using them, they’re really paying attention to what they’re doing, a forced engagement and ritual are created from that.”

Monday
On the eve of the opening of the Salone del Mobile trade fair – an event whose participants, events and connected activities generated €278m in 2025 – its organisers welcomed a delegation of designers, journalists and industry leaders to a performance at La Scala. Kicking off the evening was Maria Porro, Salone del Mobile’s president, who addressed the current global political, security and trade turbulence. “Design can contribute to peace as a daily practice,” said Porro, evoking 13th-century Persian poet Rumi. “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right-doing, there is a field – and this week, let that field be design. Let’s build a better world together.” A reminder that Milan Design Week is as much about giving meaning as it is about making money.

Tuesday
USM, Snøhetta and artist Annabelle Schneider offered a critique of culture with their installation “Renaissance of the Real” (pictured). The work aimed to draw visitors away from the digital world by creating a womb-like structure with sunlight streaming through bulbous, permeable white walls. “It’s about critiquing the feeling of how we use technology,” said Schneider. “The installation looks great on the phone but it feels different in person. We’re used to navigating flat, perfect, digital images but this is about tactility and the imperfect, and the moment of surprise that you can’t capture in the digital.”

Wednesday
Meaning was also invoked by Deyan Sudjic, who curated an exhibition for Rosewood called Objects that Speak, a conversation continued with Andrea Branzi. The showcase celebrated the late Branzi, a pioneer of the Italian radical design movement, who challenged mass production’s erasure of individuality, and championed the notion that design is not just about form and function but about creating objects that carry meaning, tell stories, and reflect and critique culture.

Thursday
Design can provide the backdrop for life to play out. This year a host of musicians took to stages across Milan to embody this, including Honey Dijon, James Blake and a stellar line-up at the Miu Miu Literary Club that featured London-based Ider and French-Senegalese singer-songwriter Anaiis.

Friday
Jil Sander’s “Reference Library” offered a moment of reflection. The installation presented a curated list of books selected by leading creatives, which visitors could leaf through (if they wore the elegant white gloves provided). I’m going to be reading The System of Objects by Jean Baudrillard. “It’s probably the best book about furniture ever written,” said architect Jack Self, who selected it for the collection. “It describes the home as an exotic ecosystem where things and people coevolve in space over time.”

Saturday
As I headed for home, I reflected on L’Appartement, an exhibition imagined by Antoine Billore for L’Artisan Parfumeur. The Paris-based Billore created a Lombard home for himself in a Milanese apartment, importing his own furniture and dotting the space with personal artefacts. Despite its temporary nature – it closed today – it was a residence filled with memories, personality and humanity.

Nic Monisse is Monocle’s design editor. For more reflections on Salone del Mobile, tune in to this week’s episode of ‘Monocle On Design’.

More from Salone del Mobile:
- Milan Design Week thinks outside the box as the industry reacts to a fractured zeitgeist

– How Milan’s central Brera neighbourhood became a premier creative hub

– A photographic tribute to Milan’s sciure: Icons of style, power, and cultural legacy

On the Tuesday night of Milan Design Week, Monocle raised a glass to the people and ideas shaping the creative industry today. Hosted at Balay – one of the city’s leading, new hospitality outposts – and in partnership with curators Fora and designer Tino Siebert, it was an exclamation point in a week flush with outstanding design coverage. Here’s a few snaps from the happy occasion thanks to our official photography partner, Sigma.

The Milan-based founders of 6AM Glassworks, Edoardo Pandolfo and Francesco Palù, seem to have a thing for swimming pools. After last year’s design week showcase in the basement-level former changing rooms of rationalist stunner Piscina Cozzi, this year the design duo moved to Città Studi’s Piscina Romano. The exhibition of their work, Over and over and over and over, largely focuses on 6AM’s lighting projects, which give Murano-made glass a contemporary twist. 

The scale of this year’s hangar-like location allowed the pair to showcase more architectural projects (a direction 6AM first started to explore at Dropcity back in 2024). A stand-out is a glass wall made from individual blocks called “Batch”, which were first used in a fashion project with Bottega Veneta. New colours for the Paysage lamp, designed by Hannes Peer (who has also created a vast ceramic wall at Fondazione Officine Saffi), were also unveiled.

Their work is a reminder that great product design is enhanced when it’s partnered with outstanding architecture – we’re looking forward to what the firm has to show in 2027.
6am.glass

Countless events compete for attention during Milan Design Week but one of the most recognisable brands is Interni, which presents showcases at various spaces around town. The installations are the idea of Gilda Bojardi, who has been editor of the magazine of the same name (owned by Mondadori) since 1994. This year’s showcase, Materiae, features a collaboration between Audi and Zaha Hadid Architects, as well as installations by architects Bjarke Ingels Group, Snøhetta and Milan-based Michele de Lucchi.

How did you start working at ‘Interni’?
After graduating in law, I worked for an important design studio but after three months I realised that it wasn’t for me. I then worked for a magazine called IN: Argomenti e immagini di Design and got to know design entrepreneurs from Mario Bellini to Ettore Sottsass. After that I lived in Mexico City for a year. When I came back to Italy at the end of the 1970s, I started to work for lighting brand Artemide, alongside art director Roberto Beretta. I was offered a job at Interni after it was bought by Electa, the most important cultural publishing house in Europe. 
 
‘Fuorisalone’ is a term that references all the events across Milan during the Salone del Mobile trade fair. You were key in its development, weren’t you?
I invented the term. Salone del Mobile didn’t want its name to be used for outside events. I was staying at the Paramount Hotel in New York, just off Broadway. And I said to myself, ‘Off Broadway, off Salone: Fuorisalone.’

How do you have the energy to keep doing this work?
It’s stressful. But you also get so much stimulus from the extraordinary people you meet, whether it’s architects, designers or journalists.
 
For our full conversation with Gilda Bojardi, click here or pick up a copy of Monocle’s ‘Salone del Mobile special’. While focused on Milan Design Week, the Berliner-size newspaper covers stories across the globe, from a partnership between Italian tile-makers and a US art foundation to the Spanish brand reviving the Eames’ modular architecture.

Need a change of scene? About an hour from Milan by high-speed train, Bologna offers a perfect getaway from the design capital’s hustle and bustle. With its traditional trattorias, historical sites and rich cultural scene, the city is a mix of classic and contemporary Italian flair. Bologna’s lively student population and distinctly homegrown contemporary scene is far removed from Milan’s more self-conscious polish.

“There’s a boom in interest in Bologna,” says Benedetta Barbieri, who runs Trattoria Montanara with her husband, Filippo Venturi. Their establishment is one of the city’s great culinary destinations, serving what Barbieri calls “home-style slow cooking from another era”. In an intimate dining room dating back to 1929, the couple serve classics such as tortellini in brodo (stuffed pasta in meat broth) on flowered Bitossi dishes.

Bologna-based fashion designer Allison Hoeltzel recommends making time for contemporary-art museum Mambo and the Museo Morandi, which displays work by the Bolognese artist. Hoeltzel, who designs a line of artisanal bags, shoes and clothes under the Officina del Poggio label, also suggests grabbing a glass of natural wine at Enoteca Storica Faccioli or Bottiglieria Vini Belli. “People value community and like to have a fun time here,” she says. “That’s a big part of what defines the good life.”

For more top tips on where to sip and shop in Bologna, click here or pick up a copy of our ‘Salone del Mobile Special 2026’ newspaper.