Milan Furniture Fair 2012

With Milan fair over for another year, I thought I would post a little photo diary of my three day trip.

Week before the Fair

I did my usual checks to make sure that my hotel and flights were all booked and OK, and realised that I had booked both for a day too early, after a £60 change of flight charge I was back on track to fly out on Wednesday the 18th April.

With a 4.30am alarm call, the drive to Gatwick at that ungodly hour was uneventful and the airport was unusually efficient with very little queuing. I was lucky to the get one of the 3 front row seats with the extra leg room (I’m 6″5`), and for those who know me well, it will come as no surprise that I was asleep before some people had even boarded!!!

As we taxied on the runway, I was rudely awakened by a commotion at the back of the plane, someone had stood up or something, took very little notice and went happily back to sleep.

After a nice nap that lasted almost all the way to Milan, I awoke slightly better rested. On the bus from the plane to the terminal the Captain joined us, and he was duly interrogated about the person that had caused the commotion, and why he had to be restrained and handcuffed to the seat, with police waiting for him on the runway.  He gave very little away, except that this was the 6th time they had trying to deport him back to Italy, and the disturbance was his way of trying to be removed from the flight again.

Day 1

The Fair

For those who have never been or heard of Fuori Saloni (Milan Furniture Fair), it’s in the new Milan Fair Rho Pero and it`s one of the largest shows world-wide with 8 large pavilions for indoor exhibitions and 60,000m for outdoor exhibitions space. The Milan Fair is one of the most important in the international trade fair sectors, full of the best (and some of the worst) design products you will find anywhere. Here are my picks of the good, the bad and the downright ugly…

The Good

Desalto

Alternative

TAO design

Jab

Arper

45 Kilo

Dots design studio

deCafe

Lights made with used coffee beans

IED MAD+BCN

Herb garden made with an old bed frame and plastic bottles

Snaidero

MK

The Bad

…and The Ugly

Day 2

With the fair done, it`s now the time for the satellite shows dotted around Milan city. With 367 organised exhibitions from front rooms, to large warehouses not to mention all the other unofficial Street sides shows. The hippest area traditionally being Tortona.

Following another day walking for 12 hours: here’s the best of what I found.

Valcucine & DeMode

Full circle designed kitchen, made with mostly recycled materials. Once it has finished it’s life as a kitchen, Valcucine will collect it and recycle it, free of charge

Austrian Design

Agape

  L’Invisibile

The best thing at Milan, an almost invisible electrical door… it’s amazing when you see detail working so well…

Molteni & C

  Resident

Blackbody

Day 3

Woke up to painful calf muscles, following 2 solid days of pounding the fair and streets of Milan. Another good breakfast and back to Tortona to see the rest of what I missed the night before. It’s unfortunate that the area has lost its edge. The big companies have moved in and are trying to piggy back on the coolness of the previous years. But this is the best of what I found there.

Chimere

spoil your pets

Saazs

Glass which are a heaters or that change from clear to sandblasted. Neat.

With a new area having started in the north of Milan, I worked my way up to Via Ventura; this new frontier was full of the best that Milan can offer, and the coolest young designers around.

 

Wendy Maarten

Gregg Parsell

 

Designer to look out for in the future – Gregg Parsell

http://www.greggparsell.co.uk

 

 

Get plastered…

It’s a long time after the dust has settled from the Milan Fair 2010, but there are a few trends still to make their way into our everyday design world. One trend that we at Morph are particularly keen on is getting plastered… literally. Plaster work is the area where a bit of lateral thinking can really add interest to otherwise bland expansive walls and monotonous colour schemes. We love simple modern lines, bordering on the bare minimalist, but a cheeky insertion of the missing ingredient of modern house building never goes amiss. We’re talking about ‘ornament’. In Victorian, Edwardian and Georgian properties ornamental detailing was rife: from dentil mouldings, twisted pillasters and reeded columns to simple plaster covings and ceiling roses all added texture and content. In today’s interior design, we’re shown the way to exciting plaster by companies such as Solomon & Wu, with their contemporary take on coving and ceiling rose designs, which they brought to LDF (click for link) in September. Art, as ever, leads the way in breaking conventions with luminary individuals such as Alexandre Farto-Vhils (below)

His inspiring work really translates well into interiors, with his simple use of type to make a ‘real statement’, if you’ll pardon the pun…

The introduction of texture into the vertical surfaces of rooms gives rise to endless possibilities, as explored by Caterina Tiazzoldi for ToolBox (below).

Obviously the cleaners would be kept really busy there, as with this apartment by Pascal Grasso Architectes.

Photograph by Nicolas Dorval Bory and full article at Dezeen.

I think that the best marriage of Farto-Vihls and practical interiors was in this Studio House by Studio Octopi (below), where walls are not only opened up to allow in more light and a feeling of space but also combine a practical element of shelving. Again, full article here at Dezeen.

Not only has the trend moved from art to interiors, but the baton has been taken up by product suppliers as well. One of our favourite stands at the Milan Fair had to be the new Soft Architecture by Flos. The echo of ornamental plasterwork is cleverly inverted, evolving into a new subtle way of looking at adding texture.

The insertion of what appears to be liquid plaster creating a lighting channel that projects into the space is a great way of playfully softening harsh geometric lines (below). The look is unashamedly minimal, yet soft and an almost comforting organic feel.

And it didn’t stop with our friends at Flos. We were highly impressed with these cooker hoods below. But as the Italians are quite slow at bringing show-pieces onto the UK market after Milan, these chaps shall remain nameless. This appliance would work beautifully alongside the Flos piece above…

And this hood (below) would work well with recessed lighting. As for anticipated availability on the UK market; drop us a line and we’ll start a petition!

 

KINETIC CHANDELIER by BOSUNG KIM

Looking for a light with and Stealth aircraft quality movement, you can’t do much better than the Kinect Chandelier by Bosung Kim. See the video below to see the how the light raises and lowers so elegant.

www.vimeo.com/8235176

Designers web site  http://www.bosungkim.com/

tuntoled light – mikko karkkainen