Milan Unpacked 2025

Our comprehensive three-part Milan report is divided across categories in Volumes 1 and 2, with Volume 3 exploring the installations and cultural experiences explored by heritage and independent brands.

Milan Unpacked - V01

A grand heritage home brings new modernity

Vogue Living's 2025 Top Australian Interior Designer and esteemed Sydney-based creative director, Jillian Dinkel, re-imagines Kilmory House, a grand Arts and Crafts estate in Point Piper, Sydney, as a bold and evocative entertaining space, where heritage detailing is punctuated by iconic, contemporary design.

Cini Boeri: Milanese designer of elegance and verve

Against the backdrop of Milan Design Week 2025, More Space looks at the influence of Milanese architect and designer, Cini Boeri, who received the highly coveted Compasso d’Oro award ceremony, twice – once for the Strips sofa in 1979 and again in 2011 for a career of originality and innovation, and whose ideas for living continue to impact design today. 

Divine intervention: The David Lopez Quincoces effect

David Harrison sat down with renowned Spanish designer David Lopez Quincoces for our friends at Est. magazine. The designer shared insights on his enduring collaboration with Living Divani, describing it as a journey of self-growth and discovery, and the evolution of his career, from his formative years to the influence of working with the iconic designer Piero Lissoni.

Listone Giordano around the world

Italian timber flooring brand Listone Giordano works around the world, with designers from Rafael Rivera in Mexico City to Patricia Urquiola in Milan, shaping interiors and exteriors defined by the raw beauty of natural timber. In the first of a series on the interior world of Listone Giordano, we look at a heritage refurbishment in Mexico City, the Grand Resort Bad Ragaz in Switzerland, Iceland’s Parliament Hotel in Reykjavik, the Fun House in Taipei and a Georgian renewal in Texas. 

Inside Atelier Viccarbe

Viccarbe was founded by industrial designer Victor Carrasco in his hometown of Valencia, where the warmth of the Mediterranean and the city's relaxed way of life influence the colours, details and materials of each collection. Here, the traditions of the atelier focus on design, research and development with designers from Jaime Hayon to Patricia Urquiola.

Baxter and the alchemist’s lab

Italian brand Baxter is the combination of experience and passion, business know-how and a desire not to follow the rules. Working closely with designers from Piero Lissoni to Paola Navone and Studiopepe, Baxter bridges the tradition and innovation of Italian leather production to make the material the hero of every collection.

Celebrating the great Gaetano Pesce

With a new show 'Nice to See you' headlining at the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana in Milan and projects spanning collections for Fish Design and a playful collaboration with sock brand Double Soul, the visionary creative sadly passed away early last month. To celebrate his illustrious career, we are re-publishing our recent story on the multidisciplinary designer, architect and artist whose curiosity would shape six decades of design and elevate our connection with the world around us.

Moooi Carpets: Where art meets design

Moooi’s signature carpets are created by renowned names in the world of interiors, fashion, visual arts, design, textiles, illustration and photography. From artist Jae Yong Kim, to designers Marcel Wanders and Front, each carpet represents the artist’s imagination and pushes the traditions of rug making to shape daring and exquisite art pieces designed to be collected.

Summer reading – From science fiction to social dynamics, how the 70s shaped the sofa

It was 1972 when the Museum of Modern Art in New York opened the exhibition, ‘Italy: The New Domestic Landscape,’ headlined by designers including Mario Bellini, Cini Boeri and Tito Agnoli. Radical in both concept and ambition, it pinpointed design’s shifting landscape and the invention of the modular sofa system, a design that 50 years later continues to shape how we connect.

Colour forward at Gebrüder Thonet Vienna

First presented in Milan 2023, the softly rounded Luftballon collection designed by Vatler Cagna for Gebrüder Thonet Vienna is inspired by the voluminous contours of a balloon. Carefully balanced in size and proportion, the armchair and sofa are quirky and full of personality, with sinuous lines and soft curves distinguished by large sculptural cushions. The range highlights the company’s ancestral know-how, its punchy colours adding a contemporary layer to the traditional blonde or dark-stained wood.

Creating Space: Inspired by...

In the final of More Space's Creating Space series, we look at Space's focus on sharing interiors that inspire. Launching A Life Individual almost 10 years ago, the film and print campaign would explore the evolving spaces we live in and the uniquely creative ways we shape our homes. Featuring stylist Megan Morton and artist Andrea Sullivan, along with creative directors, designers, doctors, and the playwright Joanna Murray-Smith, each interior revealed how the objects chosen provided joy and beauty.

Creating Space: The designers...

As More Space takes a look at the early days of Space, we revisit the design festivals, award programs, talks, workshops and Space+Design Residency that have shaped Space’s modus operandi. Opening the doors to designers from Milan, Paris, São Paulo, London, Amsterdam and New York to share background stories behind design collections, and take part in curated local events, has added an important cultural layer and fostered a broader understanding of how design shapes our lives.

Creating Space: The early days...

To help celebrate Space’s 30th birthday, More Space is taking a design ride back to the early days in a three-part series. From the launch of Space’s architecturally designed showrooms in Sydney and Melbourne in 1993, to the bold SPACE identity and cache of campaigns, the design festivals, installations and international design guests, architects, designers and clients who have embraced design icons for their projects and homes, we explore Space’s design journey across South East Asia, and talk to some of the people instrumental in shaping who Space is today.

Foscarini, beginning with light

Founded in 1981 on the Venetian Island of Murano, the Italian lighting brand Foscarini is known for their collaborations with Patricia Urquiola and Rodolfo Dordoni, the iconic design collections Caboche, Buds and Twiggy, and an innovative approach to materials and manufacturing. In a two-part series, More Space dives into Foscarini’s distinctive vision and creativity hub, that now includes the evocative lighting group Ingo Maurer, and their deep interest in our emotive responses to light. 

Milanese maestras: Bernhardt-Vella, Chiara Andreatti and Patricia Urquiola

In the final of our series that celebrates International Women’s Day through the work of world-renowned designers, More Space explores the design catalogues of four design studios based in Milan: Ellen Bernhardt and Paola Vella of Bernhardt-Vella, Chiara Andreatti and Patricia Urquiola’s Studio Urquiola.

Eileen Gray, taming the avant-garde

A contemporary of Le Corbusier, Eileen Gray was a painter, photographer, designer and self-taught architect who moved to Paris in 1917 and became known for an avant-garde approach to furniture and architecture, and a thoroughly modern view that design should lead to ‘a complete harmonious, and logical life’.

Cini Boeri, design trailblazer

The remarkable career of designer and architect the late Cini Boeri, who was affectionately known as the "lady of Italian design”, is an important legacy. One of the first women to graduate in architecture, then working with Gio Ponti and Marco Zanuso before setting up her own studio, Boeri was at the forefront of the groundbreaking ideas coming out of Italy in the 1960s and 70s.

Ettore Sottsass: architect, poet and master of Memphis

A career designing buildings, furniture, electronics, ceramics, lighting, jewellery and textiles, Ettore Sottsass was a man of the world who wrote poetry and collected friends including Allen Ginsberg, Max Ernst and Pablo Picasso. His colourful, evocative work pushed and pulled the design industry's toy, industrialisation, to create pieces that expressed an attitude that still connects today.

The high tech, hand made world of Edra

With legendary art director Massimo Morozzi, founders Valerio and Monica Mazzei launched Edra in the final days of the Memphis movement, developing a research hub where designers Francesco Binfaré and Fernando and Humberto Campana helped establish Edra's reputation for art, innovation and a fascination for the avant-garde. 

Turning the tables

With open plan living the table is at the heart of the home. It is the place where we sit with family and friends to eat, drink and talk about our day, and it has become a workspace for children and adults alike as many of us navigate a home/work balance for at least part of the week.

Monica Armani on design that refreshes the soul

Based in Trento at the foot of the Dolomite Mountains, architect Monica Armani has created a house and studio that balances private and work spaces, and is immersed in nature which Armani describes as ‘the engine of everything’ and the foundation for objects and spaces that ‘refresh the soul’.

Eight sofas that will change the way you live

What started back in the late 17th century as a stretched-out armchair to accommodate the commodious dresses of the time, slowly grew longer and longer to serve more and more people. Flash forward to the 1970’s and everything changed. With an emphasis on a more casual way of living and the rejection of sofas that forced users to sit side-by-side in a long row, innovative 70’s designers like Mario Bellini and Cini Boeri used modularity to create more organic and flexible sofa concepts with no limits to size or shape. This radical approach still works wonders today. The 'upholstered landscape' allows for a range of sitting and lying positions, making it possible to work, rest and play, without leaving the comfort of the lounge room.