Highlights from Salone del Mobile 2025

New Craftsmanship, Emotional Spaces & Design Reimagined

Milan Design Week never fails to stir the senses, but this year at Salone del Mobile 2025, the energy feels especially electric. Under the theme “New Craftsmanship: A New World”, the fair explores the ever-evolving dance between hand-made tradition and industrial innovation. There's a clear shift. Design is no longer about status symbols. It’s about how it makes us feel, how it fits into a lifestyle, how it moves.

Younger generations—especially Gen Z and younger millennials—aren’t collecting for permanence. They're curating for experience. Modular furniture, storytelling installations, digital immersion—these are the new pillars of modern luxury. And Salone responds with a dynamic lineup of artists, designers, and visionaries, from Oscar-winning filmmakers to avant-garde collectives.

Here are the ones that left a mark:

1. Paolo Sorrentino’s “La dolce attesa” — Waiting as an Emotional Journey

Set at the entrance to Pavilions 22–24, Oscar-winning filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino creates a space that feels more like a whispered secret than an installation. La dolce attesa (The Sweet Wait) explores the agony—and quiet beauty—of waiting. It’s cinematic and raw, a conceptual pause where desire simmers.

“Waiting is agony,” Sorrentino says, “but the sweet anticipation is a journey.” And this journey is stunning: a void filled with the possibility of everything. It’s a metaphysical waiting room where stillness becomes motion, fear becomes wonder, and a lull in time becomes something we might want to linger in.

2. Sema Topaloğlu at Pasino Glasshouses

While Venice and Bohemia often steal the spotlight for their historic glassmaking traditions, Turkish glasswork—dating back to the 16th century, offers an equally rich yet underappreciated legacy. Interior designer Sema Topaloğlu, known for her elegant homes in Florence and atmospheric hotels in Istanbul, channels this heritage into a mesmerizing new installation at Pasino Glasshouses during Alcova Milano. Her pieces blur the boundary between structure and storytelling, creating fantastical forms that defy the rigidity of wood and concrete. “Glass allows me to create fantasy worlds,” Topaloğlu says, reflecting on her upbringing surrounded by Turkish art and her collector father's trove of treasures.

Her contribution to Milan Design Week is as much about honoring craftsmanship as it is about imagining new, joy-filled futures. Looking ahead, Topaloğlu is plotting a creative expansion that bridges Istanbul and Milan—with an eye on fashion collaborations, runway sets, and multidisciplinary work rooted in celebration, emotion, and energy. As she puts it: “I want to keep crafting joy. That’s the magic of Turkish design.”

3. Loewe’s Teapots – 25 Artists, One Object, Infinite Stories

Leave it to Loewe to elevate the humble teapot to an object of cult status. This year, the house collaborates with 25 globally renowned artists, architects, and designers to reinterpret the teapot, not just as a functional item but as a vessel for imagination, culture, and form.

Held at Palazzo Citterio, the Loewe Teapots collection is both playful and reverent, celebrating Loewe’s ongoing commitment to craftsmanship across disciplines. It’s the ninth year Loewe has surprised us at Salone, and once again, they remind us that luxury isn’t loud. It’s thoughtful, intentional, and rooted in creative curiosity.

4. Carlo Ciussi at A arte Invernizzi – A Dance of Color and Trace

Inside A arte Invernizzi, the solo exhibition Carlo Ciussi. Una danza di tracce e colori (A Dance of Traces and Colors) takes us on a painterly journey from 1983 to 1990. Moving away from his early geometric abstractions, Ciussi embraces sinuous, open forms—canvases that pulse with movement and personal rhythm.

Curated by Lorenzo Madaro, the show feels like a quiet storm. These aren’t just paintings—they're emotional codes, etched in color.

5. Morghen Studio’s Experimental Chandelier – Craft Meets Provocation

Design duo Roberto Tarter and Rodolfo Viola of Morghen Studio blur the line between sculpture and illumination with a chandelier that feels like it’s from another planet, or perhaps, the future of artisanal design.

From their workshop in Milan’s Bovisa district, they fuse classical craft with boundary-pushing material play. The piece unveiled at Salone is theatrical, technically obsessive, and visually poetic. It’s the kind of work that makes you pause and think: who says design can’t be a little punk?

6. Marimekko x Laila Gohar – The Joy of Life (in Bed)

In the oldest working theatre in Milan—Teatro Litta—a bedroom becomes a manifesto. Laila Gohar and Marimekko creative director Rebecca Bay co-create an immersive installation inspired by the Finnish “Siskonpeti” slumber-party bed concept.

Picture this: 18 mattresses, bold archival Marimekko stripes, soundscapes, eye masks, and pajama sets. It’s cheeky, cozy, and wildly alive—a celebration of softness, Lail'a’s signature cakes, and the dreamy blur between rest and play. Design doesn’t get more cozy than this.

7. Dima Srouji’s Hybrid Exhalations at Gucci: Bamboo Encounters

In the cloisters of Chiostri di San Simpliciano, Palestinian architect and visual artist Dima Srouji presents Hybrid Exhalations, a hauntingly beautiful series of bamboo baskets merged with hand-blown glass. The work speaks of fragility, resilience, and invisible histories—each basket foraged from markets around the world, anonymously made and reinterpreted through delicate, breath-like glass sculptures created by the Twam family in Jaba’, Palestine. “They were blowing into the void,” says Srouji, referencing the poetic tension between control and chance. Part object, part memory, these hybrids feel like living organisms caught mid-transformation. The installation is part of Bamboo Encounters, a group show curated by 2050+ and commissioned by Gucci, celebrating one of the brand’s most iconic codes through seven global perspectives.

8. The First-Ever Euroluce International Lighting Forum
2025 also marks the debut of the Euroluce International Lighting Forum—a two-day deep dive into lighting design with masterclasses and roundtables. It’s a much-needed spotlight on a discipline often overlooked, yet essential in shaping mood and experience.

9. [Cover photo]: Rive Roshan's colour-changing installation doubles as a solar collector

Ruben de la Rive Box and Golnar Roshan have installed a striking solar panel in Villa Bagatti Valsecchi's garden fountain. Sun Catcher was created using technology from SOL R&D, a startup specialising in "aesthetic photovoltaics". Its multicoloured surface appears to change colour as it catches the light in different ways.

At its core, Salone del Mobile 2025 feels like a redefinition of luxury, more fluid, more emotional, more in tune with how we actually live, even in these turbulent and uncertain times.