Milan Design Week: Eclectic Collections Take Center Stage

This article is part of our Design special report previewing Milan Design Week.

From furniture inspired by a dancing Muppet bird named Betsy to proposals for coping with a dystopian future, families of objects at Milan Design Week said more with more. Lara Bohinc turned her childhood love of Betsy into a joyous furniture group with overlapping leather scales that may have unconsciously evoked the avian character’s reptile forebears. A darker mood permeates the prototypes for temperature regulating and food-producing objects that the industrial design studio LAYER offers as panaceas for a future haunted by climate change and resource scarcity.

Handcrafted, With Personality

These home furnishings come with their own personalities, free of charge. The designer Lara Bohinc has partnered with Uniqka, an Istanbul-based leather design brand, to create her five-piece Betsy collection — with a round coffee table, a side table, a console, a bench and a standing mirror.

Each object is handcrafted by layering small panels of leather, piece by piece, onto wooden frames to create a featherlike effect. Ms. Bohinc was inspired by flora and fauna, birds not exempted, and she wanted to translate these ideas into hide. Tactility is a prominent feature in the collection; the pieces almost beg to be touched.

“Same as you want to touch animals,” Ms. Bohinc said. “Whenever you see a cute animal, you want to stroke it, you want to touch it, and this one’s not going to run away, so you can play with it.”

The collection gets its name from the dancing Muppet Betsy Bird, who, Ms. Bohinc recalled, always made her laugh when she was growing up.

“When items become something that almost seems alive, something that you want to play with, it’s got its own personality,” she said, adding, “I think that’s quite important to me.”

The collection is on view Monday through Sunday at Alcova, Villa Bagatti Valsecchi, 48 Via Vittorio Emanuele II; alcova.xyz. — MORGAN MALGET

Agrarian Inspiration

For his Anachron collection shown at the Alcova design fair this week, Doruk Kubilay, founder of Studio Lugo in Istanbul, produced fringed lamps, silk upholstered stools and geometric storage pieces that had a single conceptual source: Anatolia’s more than 10,000-year agrarian heritage. This inspired Mr. Kubilay to do a bit of time traveling when he created, say, a wood-veneer room organizer with a tuft of horsehair at the top evoking farm labor of the past, and with conical steel feet at the bottom that pointed to an industrial future.

The designer — a self-proclaimed extrovert — said he tapped into the “deeply ingrained human need to gather and unite” by making his work a focal point for get-togethers. The zigzag outlines of his pendant lights, for instance, exert a kind of magnetic force like lightning. He imagined “a subtle ritualistic fire filtering through wheat fields,” he said. “In these moments, objects and geometries come together, and so do people, concentrating their energy toward the center.”

The Anachron series can be seen at Alcova, Monday through Sunday, at Villa Bagatti Valsecchi, 48 Via Vittorio Emanuele II, Varedo, Italy; studiolugo.com. — YELENA MOROZ ALPERT

Creating “Quiet Witnesses”

“I don’t know if you’ve ever had that feeling when you walk into a really old home, and you just sort of feel a soul in the space,” said Whitney Krieger, an interior and product designer based in New York City and Florence, Italy. “Or if you go vintage shopping and you touch things, and you can just tell they’ve lived a thousand lives.”

Ms. Krieger was explaining why she named her two-year-old design studio Soft Witness. In this case, “soft” means hushed, and “witness” means that the objects surrounding us in our homes aren’t just sitting there but have some kind of animating force of their own.

“So everything we create in a space are quiet witnesses to our lives,” she said.

As with many people, the Covid pandemic shook Ms. Krieger out of one of those lives and deposited her into another. Formerly a senior designer at the New York City interiors company AvroKO, she decided to return to school to study product design in Italy and then to open a business in that epicenter of high-end furniture making.

This week at the Alcova fair, she is exhibiting a mix of production goods and prototypes, including the Cono chair covered in baby alpaca mohair (“soft” as in fuzzy), which was inspired by a head of Romanesco cauliflower.

Cono, which Ms. Krieger designed a few years ago while still in graduate school (and then was parked in its first prototype in her living room), originally evoked a kind of slogan in her mind: “Look spiky, sit soft.” The idea was to defeat the beholder’s expectations. “When you sit in it, it’s almost like a little massage,” she said.

Soft Witness products can be seen Monday through Sunday at the Alcova exhibition at the Villa Borsani, 148 Via Umberto I, Varedo, Italy; softwitness.com. — JULIE LASKY

Music Festival-Inspired Design

A furniture collection by MORPHO, a new Belgian brand connected to the Tomorrowland electronic dance music festivals, will be unveiled in Milan. The six pieces — a dining table and chair, bar stool, adjustable lounger, daybed and lounge chair — were produced by and will be exhibited at Salone del Mobile by the hardwood furniture company Ethnicraft.

“We wanted to create something special to incorporate the DNA of the music festivals and translate it into a contemporary language that can be applied to furniture pieces,” said Dieter Vander Velpen, the collection’s designer. He is the creative director of the Great Library Design Studio in Antwerp, Belgium, which he founded with Tomorrowland.

The name MORPHO refers to a genus of butterfly and, more abstractly, to the insect in Tomorrowland’s festival logo. The butterfly is also found in many Art Nouveau designs, which partly inspired the collection’s sinuous curves. The pieces, which are meant to be used indoors and out, were produced in Ethnicraft’s workshop in Indonesia. All are offered in teak; some are also available in oak. Ethnicraft will display them from Tuesday through Sunday in Hall 14, stand C33, of the Salone del Mobile, at a booth designed by Great Library Design Studio whose style Mr. Vander Velpen described as “brutalism in nature”; ethnicraft.com. — RIMA SUQI

Inspired Home Furnishings

Furrowed and pebbly beach sand, the rotating torsos of modern dancers, flame reflections shimmering in polished metal — these are some phenomena that the designer and sculptor Gregory Beson observes meditatively and incorporates into his inventory. His latest furniture in this vein for the metalwork company Mingardo will debut at Milan Design Week.

Brass candlesticks (named Eva, to evoke evening) have looped handles that foster portability and hark back to a time when people carried candles in holders to their bedsides at night. Coffee tables (named William, in homage to the choreographer William Forsythe’s geometric experiments) have bronze polygonal tops with walnut slab legs peering through and recalling carpenters’ tenon joints.

“It was a way to tip the cap to woodworking techniques,” Mr. Beson said during an interview at his Brooklyn studio, which overlooks the Newtown Creek’s rocky shoreline and is lined in raw lumber.

Mr. Beson’s one-armed Mingardo armchairs (named Pina, after the choreographer Pina Bausch) have bronze petals that encourage swiveling around the walnut slab seats. He has enjoyed watching people pivoting in the Pina prototype, leaning from side to side, “finding their way in it,” he said. Mingardo galvanizes the bronze, resulting in subtle bubbling that seems to shift when viewed from different angles. “It’s almost like the ocean lapping on it,” Mr. Beson said.

The collection will be shown Monday through Sunday at Mingardo’s new gallery at 42 Corso di Porta Nuova; mingardo.com. — EVE M. KAHN

Highlighting Earth’s Perils

LAYER, the London industrial design studio led by Benjamin Hubert, is marking its 10th anniversary with the retrospective exhibition “101010,” which also looks to the future.

The show culminates in a group of six prototypes that provide solutions to the perils waiting for the planet.

“So keeping cool, keeping warm, foodstuffs, water access, flora and fauna” are the fundamentals that the collection seeks to preserve, Mr. Hubert said.

Among the products are a set of glass fermentation jars, which use water to create an air seal for proper degassing and depressurization, and a nomadic rain catchment tower, which filters the collected water through layers of natural materials and stores it in a rubber-lined bladder. Also in the collection are a biofuel oil lamp, earthenware cooling towers, a modular bee home and a future uniform — one jacket with three configurations.

Mr. Hubert said the objects, which the studio designed with previous collaborators, were conceptual rather than transactional, and he hoped they would spark new questions and conversations in Milan.

“The state of the world is more and more challenging,” he said. “I think designers have a responsibility to be part of the conversation and challenge the zeitgeist, rather than just creating more stuff for stuff’s sake.”

The exhibition is on view Monday through Sunday at 10 Corso Como, Project Room; layerdesign.com. — MORGAN MALGET