From Gucci to Toogood: 5 Discoveries from Milan Design Week 2024

As Milan Design Week 2024 wraps up, the show delivers new and exciting offerings in the world of interior design. From Gucci's striking new project to the stunning collections from some of the big brands participating in the Salone del Mobile, here is what you might have missed from this new edition of the great international design festival. 

Gucci Design Ancora: Italian design with Spanish flavor

The new creative director of the Italian brand Gucci—Sabato De Sarno—is behind the idea of ​​this new project: Gucci Design Ancora. Unveiled on Monday, April 15, the project consists of a special reissue of five significant pieces from the golden age of Italian design. The pieces, renewed in Rosso Ancora color (a spectacular wine color chosen by De Sarno to represent a new chapter for the brand) are exhibited during this Milan Design Week in the Gucci boutique on Via Montenapoleone 7. 

The Spanish architect Guillermo Santomà devised the setting for this design piece selection in collaboration with De Sarno. The Italian designer chose the color green, which creates the perfect contrast for the maroon pieces. Still, the setting created by Santomà adds real impact.

"If we had simply put all the objects together, we would have created a living room," said Santomà. "Instead, we decided to remove the limits imposed by how we use these objects and create a kind of limbo.”

The result is a simple but striking scenography, which turns the collection pieces into true works of art. "The objects that float in this limbo have no meaning or function. They are just form, materiality and color." And the color, without a doubt, is spectacular.

The collection's pieces are authentic icons of Italian design, produced in collaboration with several Italian design firms.

• The Storet chest of drawers was designed by Nanda Vigo for Acerbis (1994, reissued in 2020).
• The Clessidra rug, designed by Nicolò Castellini Baldissera based on a design by his grandfather Piero Portaluppi, published by cc-tapis (2024).
• The Parola lamp, designed by Gae Aulenti and Piero Castiglioni for FontanaArte (1980).
• The Le Mura sofa by Mario Bellini for Tacchini (1972, reissued in 2022).
• The Opachi vase, designed by Tobia Scarpa for Venini (1960, reissued in 2021).

The Rude Arts Club by Faye Toogood + Tacchini + CC Tapis

Rude Arts Club is a little escape from the hustle and bustle of the streets of Milan during Design Week —when hundreds of thousands of visitors crowd the streets and events held in every corner of the city. To mark the occasion, the location at Milan's Santo Stefano Square has been completely reimagined as the location for two design collections presented in parallel. Multidisciplinary designer Faye Toogood is the center of this event, which features her Cosmic furniture collection (in collaboration with Tacchini) and Rude, her second collection of cc-tapis rugs. 

The space is a house decorated with care, color and emotion. It is full of unique rooms, each decorated to reflect the creativity of the British designer. The rugs are mounted on the walls as if they were ancient works of art, and the interiors are filled with spectacular armchairs, sofas and divans with satin finishes. Everything is striking, colorful and 'very Toogood.'

But the space goes far beyond a presentation of furniture and rugs. This beautifully decorated house also has a screening room, where composer Giorgio di Salvo has created an immersive space through music. In addition, the well-known Milanese bar Bene Bene is in charge of some evenings to remember. On the other hand, on some of the walls, the initial sketches of the rugs designed together with cc-tapis hang, showing the work process behind these spectacular designs.

UNNO Gallery presents Origin

The UNNO ​​Gallery returns to this edition of Milan Design Week to present Origin, a group exhibition of four Latin American artists and designers. Through the work of Mark Grattan, Estudio Persona, Room 116 and Andrea Vargas Dieppa, this exhibition tries to explore the myths and tales of antiquity that speak of humanity's origins.

For Maria Dolores Uribe and Laura Abe Vettoretti (founders of UNNO ​​Gallery), the objective of Origin was to combine the work of several artists from different places in Latin America. They all took on their own interpretation of the concept of the beginning of “origin” in a different and personal way. Thus, the idea materialized through a series of very distinct and individual design pieces loaded with tradition and cultural content. 

This exhibition is on display at 8 Via Palermo during the Milan Design Week.

The Acerbis and MDF Italia collections

Of course, the core of Milan Design Week is the Salone del Mobile. Held in a large exhibition center on the city's outskirts, the fair hosts thousands of international design firms each year to present their collections and new products in Milan. This year, two Italian firms that have shaped the global design scene have once again shown their collections together: MDF Italia and Acerbis.

On this occasion, MDF Italia renews its portfolio of designers and projects, presenting a selection of new products and collections. The Bonnet tables by Marialaura Irvine, the Peggy armchair by Gio Tirotto, as well as the Cantle chair collections by Marco Lavit and Edo by Tommaso Caldera are some of the brand's new products. But, without a doubt, the most striking proposal of the season is the Array sofa designed by Snøhetta. The couch has a versatile and flexible modular design, built from small independent pieces that allow you to create an infinitely long sofa with both curved and straight shapes.

For its part, Acerbis has created a unique space full of identity for the occasion in collaboration with the architect Pitsou Kedem. In this setting, Acerbis presents its new designs: the Lokum blown glass coffee tables by Sabine Marcelis and the Élitra furniture by Pietro Russo in a series of different configurations.

VERSO's temporary gallery

The traveling design gallery VERSO is traveling to Europe for the first time, opening the exhibition “Palma & Bravo: Dialogues between Brazil and Chile” in Milan on the occasion of Design Week. The exhibition is a dialogue between two Latin American design studios—Palma, established in São Paulo, Brazil, and Bravo, in Santiago, Chile. Both studios present new collections combining tradition and craftsmanship with new and interesting technologies.

Palma presents the Bingo collection with a wide range of carefully handcrafted pieces, like a floor lamp, a table lamp, a side table, an armchair, or a mirror. The artisanal techniques are the true protagonists of the collection. On the contrary, the Bravo Trama storage system exploits a 100% technical and rational design that seeks to minimize the number of pieces with a technical assembly and orthogonal geometry.