Everything Is a Column
Notes from Milan Design Week 2025
I had been to Milan once before: 24 hours, in and out, enough to clock the Duomo and a carbonara; a postcard as it were, a mere fridge magnet.
But not this time for this was Design Week™ and I had reasons to be everywhere, pulled across the city. I had that particular low hum of anticipation for a new place, for discovery, childatdisneylanditis or another ailment similar.
An unlovable object meets an unstoppable force
I have a self inflicted, long standing disposition in fashion and in architecture: of loving the un-beautiful. Things that exist outside the standard register of what we have agreed counts as attractive, that’s where I try to push myself.
The Torre Velasca was a case study in my architecture degree, presented as a cautionary tale. Too strange, too heavy, too much but I came to love it entirely on my own terms. That freaky lil skyscraper!
I turned a corner in Milan and it was just there, rising above the roofline with objective confidence, I felt something akin to vindication. Not everyone wants to be a Torre Velasca appreciator. By pure fluke I was invited up to the terrace level, the first time it had been opened to the public in years or possibly even decades. Whilst up there in awe, I discovered something I had never seen in any image: blue tiled floors. Small, intricate, slightly unexpected tiles covering the external terraces. Details that only exist for the person standing on them. Scale changes what you see; get close enough to anything and it stops being a symbol and transforms into a surface. That was to be the lesson of the whole trip.
HONEY, I grew the pepper grinder.
The best installations I saw were not architecture pretending to be objects. They were objects that had become architecture. Scale, repetition and theatre transformed these objects into something far greater than their original purpose.
Alessi’s installation, centred around the work of Ettore Sottsass of Memphis Milano fame, took a salt and pepper grinder and turned it into a column. Not metaphorically. Literally enlarged and monumentalised an object we use every day for pasta or oven chips. If you know your Sottsass, this is not surprising: the man spent his career making the domestic feel rhetorical, imbuing the everyday with ornament and irony and a very knowing sense of theatre. A man after my own heart.
The column has always been a performance. The salt shaker, it turns out, was already a column waiting in the wings. Set amongst the cloisters of a medieval Italian building surrounded by century-old columns, this motif was even more striking. I was genuinely blown away.
Aesop did something different, using the same translation of object. Fifteen thousand bottles arranged into a wave that interacted with their new lamp collection. Where Alessi worked through the singular, Aesop worked through accumulation: so many identical objects that the object itself dissolved and what remained was atmosphere, movement and light. I left both installations wanting to make things, which is about the best you can ask of any exhibition.
Eames - one for the grid girls
I should say upfront: I am not a hater.
Seeing a recreation of the Eames House at the Triennale felt genuinely significant.
But.
In context, surrounded by trees with dappled light falling through vegetation onto its flat surfaces, it is beautiful. The landscape softens its edges and against all odds it feels lived in.
Therefore.
Removed from that and placed in a gallery, it becomes something else. A prefabricated box... an extraordinarily innovative, historically significant and genuinely trailblazing prefabricated box. But a box nonetheless. I looked at it and understood it intellectually and felt almost nothing. Context makes architecture. Without it, you are just looking at the bones.
Anyone can acknowledge that Beyonce is a phenomenal singer. That does not mean every album is for you. (Even though they should be.)
High camp at Cucchi
The Marni x Cucchi pop-up at Caffe Cucchi was one of the most joyful things I saw all week. What they had done was create a vernacular: a colour palette, a new logo, a visual language so specifically and exuberantly Italian that it seemed impossible it would only exist for a week.
It felt permanent, embedded, as though it had always been there and you had simply not noticed it before. Most things that try to be this camp end up being busy. This knew exactly what it was doing, and I genuinely was enamoured.
In a world where a lot of fashion has apparently decided that the entire spectrum of colour runs from beige to greige, experiencing something this saturated, this confident, felt almost radical. It made me feel optimistic. I did not expect a cafe pop-up to do that.
A Saffron possession or obsession?
I had two risottos in Milan yet I never have risotto, I am not, by definition, a risotto person. Nevertheless something came over me: some mild, pleasant form of culinary possession. Da Giacomo, the seafood one, for lunch (classy) an octopus risotto and a glass of white wine so dry and so minerally I felt like I was in a 50s romance movie with Elizabeth Taylor. Then onto Trattoria del Ciumbia, the Milanese Risotto, traditional and golden, not in my usual wheelhouse but I felt the holy risotto ghost upon me once more.
Milan is a city that rewards being present in it. The streets are close, the buildings press in on you, things reveal themselves when you get near enough. The risotto was good because I was there, in that specific room, at that specific moment in the trip when I had just seen fifteen thousand Aesop bottles arranged into a wave and a Sottsass column and the blue tiles at the top of a building I had loved for years without ever being allowed to.
I call these snow globe moments: you will probably never have the same experience again even if you went back a second time, but you can shake the memory in your mind and you are back again, not just to a place but to a time too.
People sometimes say Milan is dirty. That there is nothing to do, I have a new rebuttal for this statement.
Maybe you would prefer Dubai
House of D’vey is for all the architect girlies who just haven’t realised it yet. Fifty percent lifestyle, fifty percent architecture, and absolutely none of it boring. Promise.
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Thanks so much for reading honestly! Please let me know if you’ve got this far in the comments, and what you thought!
See you next week!!
Bisous