Design lovers, it’s your time. Milan Design Week 2026 runs from 20 to 26 April and transforms the city into a creative hub that will no doubt leave you inspired. Milan Design Week is unofficially divided into two events.
First, there’s the Salone del Mobile: the world’s largest furniture fair. It opens on 21 April at Fiera Milano Rho and runs through to the end of Milan Design Week. For this, you’ll need a ticket, and a plan.
Then there’s the Fuorisalone: a sprawling, city-wide festival of installations, exhibitions, brand activations, showroom openings and parties. It takes over courtyards, palazzos, warehouses and even pasticcerie across Milan and it is completely free. All you need is a good pair of shoes and a willingness to lose yourself in the whimsical chaos.
For one week, designers, architects, brand directors, buyers, curators and the design-curious descend on the city. In response, Milan turns itself entirely inside out. Here, MOJEH curates your guide to Milan Design Week.
Understanding The Theme: Be The Project
This year’s edition marks the 64th Salone del Mobile and carries the Fuorisalone theme Be the Project. It is, on the face of it, a call to stop symbolising the finished object and start valuing the mess – from the intuition, responsibility, and ongoing human negotiation embedded in making things. In practice, this translates into pieces that show its workings, designs that foreground material honesty, and a noticeable move away from the sealed-off perfection of polished renders. The 2026 edition also places an exciting emphasis on circularity and young talent. Sustainability is no longer a bolt-on: it’s structural (fitting timing considering Earth Day falls on 22 April). The manifesto is on the wall. Whether the brands delivering it live up to the premise is, as always, the interesting question.
What’s New At Salone del Mobile
If you’re going to Rho – and if you’re in Milan, you should – wear comfortable shoes and go early. The fair hosts over 1,900 exhibitors from 32 countries, which is to say it operates at the scale of a small sovereign state. You will not see all of it. You will not need to. But there are three things this year that are genuinely worth orienting yourself around.
The first is Salone Raritas, a debut showcase dedicated entirely to collectible and one-of-a-kind design pieces – essentially the art fair within the furniture fair. Debuts at an institution this old are genuinely rare, and this one was already generating real pre-week conversation before the doors opened. That kind of momentum, at Salone, means something.
The second is the biennial EuroCucina, which only returns every two years, meaning if you’re here this April and skip it, you have waited two years to skip it. The kitchen halls have historically been where the most radical domestic thinking shows up: less ego than the furniture halls, more genuine innovation. It consistently makes you reconsider how you live and leaves you pondering long after the fair has wrapped.
The third is Aurea, an Architectural Fiction, an immersive walk-through installation by Maison Numéro 20 built around the idea of luxury as narrative interior. Immersive installations are everywhere this week, but the framing here is genuinely interesting enough that even if the execution disappoints, the conversation it’s trying to have is the right one.
Then there is something else entirely; not a must-see in the experiential sense, but a must-know.
OMA’s Rem Koolhaas and David Gianotten have delivered the masterplan for Salone Contract, a new institutional initiative that officially launches in 2027. This year attendees of Milan Fashion Week will be treated to the preview and, with the opportunity to familiarise yourself with its inner workings, this is something to make time for.
MOJEH’s Must-Sees
Prada Frames
Prada Frames is the week’s best argument. The fifth edition, titled In Sight and curated by Formafantasma, takes on image-making as the defining anxiety of the moment: what images do to power, truth, attention, and to the environment, at a point when the line between human-authored and machine-generated pictures is collapsing in real time.
It runs until 21 April at Santa Maria delle Grazie – the church that houses The Last Supper – with talks held in the Sacrestia, a Renaissance space attributed to Bramante. The speaker list includes Hans Ulrich Obrist, Kate Crawford, Alice Rawsthorn, Paola Antonelli, Ed Atkins, Mark Leckey, and Alfredo Jaar. There is a special night session in the Basilica itself on the Sunday, with a music performance by Hania Rani. Admission is free, on registration. Register now
Loro Piana
Loro Piana is exhibiting at Cortile della Seta – the House’s own headquarters on Via della Moscova 33 in Brera – from 21 to 26 April. Studies Chapter I: On the Plaid inaugurates what the House is framing as an ongoing series of focused interior case studies, each devoted to a single object. This first edition highlights plaid: 24 iterations, each displayed alongside the raw fibres and production methods behind it – Vicuña, Baby Cashmere, The Gift of Kings, handloom weaving, needle punching, embroidery, patchwork. Techniques that are usually invisible are made visible and invite the viewer into the pain-staking process. Every piece is made-to-order, crafted with the precision the House is known (and loved) for. In Loro Piana’s hands, the plaid becomes a thesis on what fibre expertise means when you refuse to simplify it. Open to the public from 10AM to 8PM daily.
The Audi × Zaha Hadid
The Origin, Audi and Zaha Hadid Architects’ joint installation, sits in the courtyard of Portrait Hotel Milano – a 17th-century colonnaded piazza on Corso Venezia 11 – and runs throughout Milan Design Week. The structure is a titanium-coloured fibreglass portal set on a reflecting pool, using spatial compression and expansion to slow you down while inside it. The light shifts from dawn to dusk. The interior holds sound and multimedia experiences built around Audi’s new design philosophy. The brief is anti-sensory overload, which is either sincere or ironic depending on your disposition, but the former Archbishop’s Seminary courtyard is a beautiful setting, and ZHA have worked with it rather than against it. Also on site, the the Audi Revolut F1 Team’s R26 single seater makes its Italian preview, alongside the new RS 5. This installation is both a meditation on stillness and, quietly, a car showroom. Milan contains multitudes.
Aquae Mirabiles by Buccellati
Aquae Mirabiles by Buccellati at Piazza Tomasi di Lampedusa 2 is one of the week’s most anticipated luxury activations. The Milanese jewellery and silverware House – founded in Milan in 1919 and now owned by Richemont – has built an immersive installation curated by Federica Sala and designed by Balich Wonder Studio, celebrating the Caviar silverware collection and its signature microsphere motif. English artist Luke Edward Hall’s watercolour illustrations conjure an imagined Atlantis, merging epic grandeur with poetic delicacy. Buccellati consistently does installation work that justifies the hype. This year they’ve built an entirely submerged world around a caviar pattern. Extraordinary, and very Buccellati.
Iwan Maktabi
Iwan Maktabi, the Lebanese-heritage carpet and textile House, is showing two new works this week. The first and most striking is CORA, presented as part of the Jusoor Design Collections exhibition – it features twelve sculptural stools inspired by five coral species from Saudi Arabia’s waters, developed with Saudi designers Abeer AlRabiah and Albandari Sulaiman, transforming handwoven carpets into three-dimensional forms. Three bleached pieces speak directly to coral bleaching and marine fragility. It is beautiful and devastating. The second, CADENCE, is a carpet design by David&Nicolas. Both are worth seeking out.
Bang & Olufsen
Bang & Olufsen is using Milan Design Week to preview an upcoming outdoor speaker created in collaboration with Italian stone brand Antolini. Danish audio precision meeting Italian material heritage is precisely the kind of cross-disciplinary conversation Design Week does best. Expect something that takes the relationship between object and outdoor space seriously.
Acqua di Parma
Acqua di Parma has installed Il Chioschetto – a kiosk designed by Dorothée Meilichzon – in the Cortile ERG Media. In Meilichzon’s hands, the brief of fragrance as architecture and scent as invitation to play, produces something that is part mirrored installation, part editorial narrative, and part a pop-up you would actually want to linger next to. Acqua di Parma consistently deploys its aesthetic with more spatial intelligence than most fragrance Houses manage and this year they’ve built a small world around it.
Lina Ghotmeh
At Palazzo Litta on Corso Magenta, French-Lebanese architect Lina Ghotmeh has created Metamorphosis in Motion for MoscaPartners Variations – her first outdoor site-specific intervention in Italy. A labyrinthine pavilion of curved geometries and shifting spatial sequences reinterprets the Baroque Courtyard of Honor through movement and perception.
Tom Dixon × Cosentino
Tom Dixon × Cosentino take over Casa Manzoni, Via Gerolamo Morone 1, from 20 to 25 April with Axis – a journey through sculptural table settings and experimental surfaces, with light, sound and reflection doing the atmospheric heavy lifting. The centrepiece is Dixon’s new Axis table collection, each surface clad in Éclos, Cosentino’s new mineral material that manages to be both technically innovative and beautiful. Dixon rarely does things by halves and this is worth a proper visit, not just a walk-through.
Marni × Pasticceria Cucchi
Marni has taken over Pasticceria Cucchi, Milan’s beloved 1930s pastry shop, with a pop-up designed by RedDuo Studio, running through to July. With branded plates, milk jugs, sugar sachets and more, the pop-up is a complete immersion into a brand without leaving the confines of your neighbourhood coffee shop. Come for your morning cappuccino. Stay for the aperitivo. This may be the most Milanese event happening all week.
For The Sightseers
Brera is the spiritual centre where you will find three hundred events, the Botanical Gardens, the Pinacoteca, and a network of courtyards that collectively form an unofficial exhibition steeped in centuries of history.
Isola and Porta Nuova are a harmonious juxtaposition: it is an Old Milanese neighbourhood pressed against gleaming contemporary towers; the tension is the whole point and the Isola Design Festival, now in its tenth year, knows exactly how to use it.
Tortona is where the budgets are visible and the queues are longest. Base Milano, Superstudio and Opificio 31 are your coordinates. Go with patience. Leave with opinions.
Alcova has travelled to a new destination this year, taking over the former Baggio Military Hospital and Villa Pestarini – a Franco Albini building opening to the public for the first time – for the occasion. For frequenters to the fair, the rarity is reason alone to schedule a visit.
5IVE Design Week, tucked between Sant’Ambrogio and Corso Magenta, runs under the theme Qualia of Things – a philosophical rebuke to the Internet of Things. Smaller, more intimate, and definitely worth your time.
The Grand Prize
Fendi has launched the Fendi Design Prize, a new annual award for emerging talent curated by Giulio Cappellini and judged by a jury that includes Joseph Grima, Patricia Urquiola, Neri & Hu and Rossana Orlandi. The first winner, announced at the Fendi Casa boutique in Piazza della Scala, is VIA by Gustav Craft – a furniture collection that begins with the sampietrino, the small basalt block that has paved Rome’s streets for two thousand years. The thought-provoking design features a woven leather seat in which each strap reads as a stone, a steel frame where weld joints are left visible and a rug that maps the aerial view of a Roman city worn down by centuries of living. It is design that asks, in Craft’s own words, what it means to make something that lasts.
The winning project will be realised and presented at Design Miami in December 2026, with a full Fendi Casa collection to follow in 2027. The shortlist included a leather-faced wall clock reinterpreting the Roman sundial, a collection exploring Rome through silvered and partially eroded mirror surfaces, and, unexpectedly, a luxury fitness kit designed to be displayed. The shortlist suggests that the brief produced exactly the kind of generational conversation Fendi was hoping for. This is one result to tune in for.
