If the market’s latest debuts have any lesson to tell, it’s that the design community indeed works better together. From Faye Toogood’s soft, sculptural furniture drop for Poltrona Frau to Bottega Veneta and Cassina’s reimagining of a Le Corbusier icon, industry brands across categories are coming together to bring thoughtful new offerings to designers’ tool kits. Looking for the latest in furniture, decor, lighting, and beyond? Meet the industry’s latest dynamic duos, as seen at Milan Design Week 2024.
Thom Browne x Frette
The stars of Thom Browne’s performance-fueled installation at the 19th-century Palazzina Appiani were the suit-donning models, who drifted off to sleep in cots swaddled in Frette linens flaunting the fashion designer’s imprint. Spun from the French label’s silky white cotton sateen, the duvet and sheet sets are emblazoned with Browne’s four-stripe emblem in gray embroidery, which also adorns a gray wool-cashmere blanket, throw, and decorative cushion in a contrasting ivory. Rounding out the capsule are a quilted bath mat, bath and gym towels, a terry cotton beach bag, and a cashmere dressing gown and cotton velour bathrobe spiffed up with Browne’s signature red grosgrain trim.
Formafantasma x Cosentino
During Salone del Mobile, Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin, founders of Milan- and Rotterdam-based Formafantasma, turned heads at Teatro Gerolamo with its Earthic Lab installation for Cosentino. An invitation to consider the importance of eco-conscious design processes, it captured the studio’s deft research skills in a petite collection of moody, sustainable gray and anthracite surfaces flecked with recycled PET. Featuring less than 10% crystalline silica, but laden with materials like recycled glass, post-consumer bio-resin, and Dekton remnants, they are aptly produced with recycled water and renewable electric energy, reducing carbon emissions along the way.
Faye Toogood x Poltrona Frau
At its flagship store in Milan, Poltrona Frau unveiled the expansive 2024 Imagine collection, including Squash, London designer Faye Toogood’s inaugural product assemblage for the Italian furniture maker. Melding birch plywood and polyurethane foam, the rotund armchair and ottoman have poofy, shapely silhouettes that complement the stacked side table—made of a cushion sandwiched vertically between two lacquered wood blocks. A hand painted checkerboard motif rug (crafted with Berber knotting techniques) and undulating mirrors wrapped in leather complete the playful range.
Flack Studio x Volker Haug Studio
When the glass on a vintage wall sconce that Flack Studio was installing in a recent project suddenly broke, the Melbourne architecture firm turned to Volker Haug Studio, a local practice dedicated to lighting, for an imaginative solution. That fateful day set the stage for Me and You, a collection of decorative fixtures that meditates on the joy of collaboration as much as the interplay of light and space. Take Troye, a sconce that reinterprets a Flack Studio design for Australian actor and singer Troye Sivan’s abode showcasing a curving cage finished in brushed nickel, or Tux, a table lamp that unites cast glass and painted brass underneath an enveloping fiberglass shade.
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Misha Kahn x Meritalia
Discussions of radicalism spawned Morphologica, the maximalist New York designer and artist Misha Kahn’s armchair and sofa for Meritalia. Kahn’s first partnership with a furniture brand, Morphologica is an ambitious ode to the not-often-depicted innards of the human body, rendered in sculpted polyurethane foam modules (eight for the chair and 12 for the sofa) upholstered in fabrics of myriad hues that reflect Meritalia’s pop-modernist sensibility. Solid metal frames encourage the cushy forms to collide and shift.
Karim Rashid x Natuzzi
Natuzzi Italia kicked off its 65th anniversary celebrations by presenting the Harmony 65 collection, a trifecta of monumental sofas, at its flagship showroom during Milan Design Week. The standout? Egyptian-born, New York-based industrial designer Karim Rashid’s sinuous, sink-into-it Memoria. Swathed in leather or fabric and embellished with crocodile hooks and concealed metal feet, this modular creation easily morphs from a glamorous one-armed three-seater to a commodious conversation pit centerpiece.
Bottega Veneta x Cassina x Fondation Le Corbusier
Le Corbusier originally designed the LC14 Tabouret Cabanon in 1952 for his minimalist cabin in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, on France’s Côte d’Azur. Taking cues from a wood whiskey box that washed up on the shore, it is marked by dovetail joints and oblong openings. For On the Rocks, an installation at Palazzo San Fedele, the future headquarters of Bottega Veneta, the fashion house’s creative director Matthieu Blazy teamed up with Cassina and Fondation Le Corbusier on custom editions of the tabourets bedecked in handwoven leather buoyed by textural brushwork. They were joined by those renditions first used as seating for Bottega Veneta’s 2024 winter show highlighting charred wood that evokes Japanese craftsmanship.
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