Fucinead inside Milano Fashion Week
What we saw, what struck us, what we brought back to the studio
A first-person diary from Milan Design Week 2026 — Salone del Mobile and Fuorisalone, April 20–24.
By Fabrizio Forniti, FAD — Fucine Architettura Design.
Why a story, and not yet another recap
Every year, after Design Week, dozens of reports come out, giving you the numbers, the most photographed installations and the colour trends for next winter. They are useful, but they all tend to look the same.
This year, I decided to tell you about our Milan Design Week differently: five days in which Milan turned into a construction site of ideas, experienced from the inside, through the eyes of those who design architecture and interiors for the clients of FAD — Fucine Architettura Design.
More than a recap, this is a working diary.
For the record, the official 2026 figures remain impressive: Salone del Mobile.Milano closed with 316,342 attendees from 167 countries, up 4.5% on 2025; 1,900 exhibitors from 32 countries; and 68% international trade professionals. Across the city, Fuorisalone attracted over 500,000 visitors to 1,300 events spread across 16 districts, generating an economic impact of €255 million, up 14.7%.
A system that continues to grow, in a year when Italian furniture exports, by contrast, fell by 13.1% in January alone. The fair is thriving; the industry is struggling. That is the first thing I took home with me.
But for us, the point lies elsewhere.
Let’s take a look.
Monday 20
The ritual opens the week: Kaldewei, Martinelli, Salvatori
It begins in Corso Matteotti, inside Palazzo Crespi, with the opening by Kaldewei. Three words on the invitation — Past. Now. Future. — and a neoclassical doorway opening onto a space of marble, full-height arches and a large circular skylight.
Bathroom design treated as the architecture of ritual.
This is the kind of Fuorisalone we love: the contemporary entering through a historic doorway without colonising it. People, queuing at the entrance, photograph the façade even before the product. And rightly so.
Then we move to Via Borgogna, to Martinelli Luce. The title of the collection, Human Interaction, says it all. What strikes me is not the individual lighting fixture — beautiful though it is, spherical, with black bases and transparent glass — but the curatorial performance: the designer appears in a dark robe, presents a luminous snake-like lamp against a large blue panel, and tells a story.
The lamp is not an object. It is a threshold.
That is what we try to bring into the studio: the product as the starting point for a relationship, not an end in itself.
The day ends in Via Solferino, at Salvatori. Here, I linger.
The bathroom is — literally — a marble room: zebra-striped floors in black and white bands, oval illuminated mirrors integrated into horizontally ribbed walls, sculpted fluted tiles that, under raking light, become architecture on the floor.
The material speaks again through planes, shadows and rhythms. The exact opposite of marble as “finish” — marble as worked time.
Tuesday 21
Salone in the morning, then Lago and Alchymia in Durini
Morning at the fairgrounds in Rho. The Salone is vast, and this year too, in the first two hours, it is hard to separate the substance from the noise.
Three things save me: Salone Satellite, where 700 designers under 35 from 43 countries show real work — a stand full of handles designed by the great names of the twentieth century, from Boma to Diana Damier, is a free lesson in design history; Salone Raritas by Formafantasma, the first official recognition of collectible design within the fair; and Salone Contract curated by OMA / Rem Koolhaas, which finally treats contract design as the integration of systems rather than as a mere “hospitality line”.
This, in my view, is where the Salone is repositioning its axis.
I then visit a pavilion that will stay in my photos for a long time: a mirrored forest, with real trees and island-like sofas. The product disappears; the experience is what matters.
Further on, a large monolithic travertine table with bonsai: weight, time, detail.
The Gianfranco Ferré Home bed, with its sculpted leather pillow and herringbone fabrics, confirms a feeling I had already begun to sense: absolute neutrality is in retreat; tactile comfort is the new grammar.
Evening in Via Durini. Lago opens at number 5: two arched windows, an opening cocktail, a store/kitchen presented as a hub for the contract district.
A few metres further on, Alchymia at number 7: in front of the store, a red Ferrari branded “Alchymia”. It is the signature of the fashion and luxury takeover which — I won’t hide it — I find difficult.
Design as the frame for lifestyle, the showroom as stage, the product as pretext. We talk about it at length with the clients we meet. The question we take away is clear: where does the project end, and where does the scenography begin?
Wednesday 22
Matter returns: Florim, Flos
Morning once again at the fair. The afternoon is dedicated to materials, which is where 2026 has raised the bar in a serious way.
At Florim, in Foro Buonaparte 14, the installation Piazza Castello — Milano gentile, curated with Matteo Thun and Nicola Gallizia. The windows of the piano nobile filled with glossy olive-green tiles, laid in an opus incertum pattern, make an impact from the outside. Green is one of the signature colours of 2026, finally freed from its usual role as a shorthand for “nature”.
But the moment I take home with me happens in the cellar: a large sample table where three people, fingers on stone, talk about travertine, marble and “ultra matte”.
This is design in 2026: we are returning to touch. Photography no longer beats the physical sample.
Evening at the Flos cocktail party, Corso Monforte 15. Among the installations, one stays with me: raw concrete bases with illuminated glass globes above them. Ruin and technology. Industry and lightness.
It is a metaphor for everything I saw over these five days: design in 2026 does not want to be “iconic”; it wants to be meaningful.
Thursday 23
Fuorisalone day, from sunlight to churches
Thursday is dedicated to “pure” Fuorisalone.
Morning in the sun, among villas and gardens: the atmosphere of Design Week is that of a city using design as an excuse to open itself up again.
In the afternoon, I move through the more experimental spaces, including a long visit to a frescoed chapel transformed into a living room: sofas, rugs, plants, and people sitting beneath the friezes.
It is probably the symbolic image of my week.
Decontextualisation or reactivation? It is a fine line that Milanese design must learn to guard more carefully. A church is not a pavilion. Nor is it simply a venue.
In the evening, I pass by the Dior installation: an extremely dense plant wall with the gold logo at its centre. A long queue, enthusiastic crowds. It is the perfect snapshot of the fashion takeover.
Hermès, Prada, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Bottega Veneta and Loro Piana have occupied spaces and attention in an increasingly structural way. Part of the critical world celebrates this contamination as a virtue — design becoming culture. Another part sees it as confirmation that the Salone is no longer “del Mobile”, but “del Brand”.
As often, the truth lies somewhere in the middle: the most serious contributions came from those who — I am thinking of Prada Frames: In Sight, curated by Formafantasma at Santa Maria delle Grazie — abandoned commercial logic and turned space into thought.
The others bought themselves a stage.
Friday 24
Mutina, Poliform, True Design and the train home
Last day, slower rhythm.
Mutina strikes me with a carpet-manifesto of drawn hands, a kind of index of its own designers — Hand of Suzanne, Daciuri, Karin Sako, Edition o-do-g…: a brand presenting itself as a horizontal collective, not as a style headquarters.
It is a direction I share: the value of a design company lies not in the signature of a single individual, but in the choral strength of its catalogue.
Poliform in Foro Buonaparte: a scenographic bathroom, a monolithic dark-wood washbasin, a glass jug and bottle as counterpoint. Few gestures, weight and light — the lesson of the great brands when they work with the minimum.
True Design closes my day.
Milano Centrale station, Italo train, a screen reading “Top your safety, 24.04.2026”. The week ends like this: on the tracks, with my boots dirty from the fair, full of ideas, full of questions.
What we bring back to the studio: three lessons, one direction
I will try to summarise, for ourselves and for those who follow us, what MDW 2026 gives us as working material for the coming months.
- Material, full stop.
Travertine, marble, tactile relief ceramics, lacquers, woods with visible grain, biodegradable polymers presented in research exhibitions — I am thinking of The New State of Materials by Materially: 2026 definitively closes the race towards the “perfect” finish.
The surface that wins is the one that ages well, the one that shows its time. This is what we try to do in the studio when we choose a raw stone kitchen worktop rather than a laminate stone-effect surface.
- Colour as temperature.
Absolute neutrality is in retreat. 2026 is moving towards earth tones, rusts, sage greens, ochres, dusty blues. Florim’s glossy olive green is almost a manifesto.
Colour is no longer decoration: it is the emotional temperature of a space. This is something we feel very aligned with.
- Design as hospitality.
The strongest moments I experienced — Martinelli, Salvatori, Mutina, Flos — all shared one denominator: the space was conceived as a place of encounter, not as a stage for the product.
The visitor is not a target; the visitor is a guest.
This is the Milan of design we will defend.
And then, not to be underestimated, there is the other side. Queues everywhere, rents inflated by 199%, and the suspicion that the event may have lost sight of the city it lives in.
Some of the most interesting voices in this edition were those of people who — I am thinking of the Civicity project in the outer districts — tried to bring design back outside the enclosure of the historic centre.
We are thinking about that.
In closing
We are not writing to tell you that this year design “is going in this direction”. We are writing to tell you that, over five days of Salone and Fuorisalone, we updated the way we look at material, space and clients.
In the end, the Salone is a great condensed mirror: for a studio like ours, it is the moment in the year when we check whether we are working well or badly.
I leave this edition with the feeling that the direction is right: fewer special effects, more substance, more depth, more time, more hands.
For us, the next Salone has already begun — here, in the studio.