At the end of May, with a long, elegant table set outdoors, Morel unveiled its new location to a small group of people. Guests were welcomed by an immersive installation with the new Mandalaki lamps inside and outside the pavilions of the shoe industry’s former cotton fabric factory, located in the Certosa district. Built in 1935, the eight industrial architectures are part of a 7,000 square metre village in a perfect state of preservation. In the offices, you can find the original cement tiles from the 1930s and furniture designed by Borsani, Gerli and Scarpa and produced by Arflex and Tecno. Outside, the large basins, once used for mixing milk products, now house pomegranate trees, dogwoods, loropetalum, hornbeams and rosemary. It will officially open its doors in autumn, to host dinners, talks, installations and private events.

Louis Vuitton inaugurates its flagship store in Garage Traversi to celebrate 10 years of Objets Nomades collections. A former car park in the fashion district, inaugurated in 1939 and designed by Giuseppe De Min, the building had been out of use since 2003. The French fashion house has rented part of the building (6,000 square metres) for three years, and acquired in 2018 by the company Invesco Real Estate. On the upper floors there will be offices, while the showroom will be on the ground floor. After redeveloping the building, restoring the original colour of the plaster and arranging the panoramic terraces, the historic rationalist concrete architecture with its spiral staircase is ready to return to the city.

Coinciding with Design Week is the opening of a part of the park of the new residential project in Via Orti, designed by Michele De Lucchi and realised by BNP Paribas Real Estate Property Development Italy. A €100 million investment has been used to convert a 14,600 square metre area between Via Orti and Via Lamarmora: 74 residential units, two multifunctional office units and an underground garage. All immersed in a 10,000 square metre park. Park within the park, there is the historic garden, once used for the cultivation of medicinal plants, hidden and almost forgotten for 30 years. An oasis of relaxation, amidst the scent of lavender, sage and artemisia, marigolds and anemones. It is open to the public from Monday to Saturday (9 am to 7 pm from April to October, 9 am to 5 pm from November to March).

A few steps from the Teatro alla Scala, the Circolo Filologico is one of the city’s oldest cultural institutions, dedicated to the study of ancient civilisations and languages. At Design Week 2022, it hosted part of the Design Variations group show curated by Mosca & Partners. However, once the Salone del Mobile is over, it will not be exactly the same as before. For instance, the new café designed by Marialaura Rossiello Irvine will remain on the ground floor, a series of quiet, intimate spaces: café, reading area, lounge and garden, “in dialogue with the building’s Art Nouveau architecture,” the designer explains.

The legendary George Sowden – the “mind” of Olivetti design from the 1970s to the 1990s, among Memphis founders in 1981 – has always had his studio in Corso di Porta Nuova. When the premises of a bank, right next door, became vacant, he decided to rent them out as a temporary exhibition and meeting space. His coloured silicone lamps from the Shades collection – presented last September and now a real product – were on display during Design Week. As well as the new designs of the Danish brand Raawi, which Sowden and Nathalie Du Pasquier also collaborated for, along with Olimpia Zagnoli and Omar Sosa. It will host temporary exhibitions. The colourful tiled courtyard at the end of the space is not to be missed. 

With Design Week, The Tokyo Toilet has brought design to Milan’s public toilets. The first toilet has been installed in the Duomo metro station and is set to be there, for at least three years. If this experiment works, it could change the stigma related to public toilets and take the Nippon Foundation’s project to other big cities all over Europe. After having involved 16 internationally renowned architects in Japan, including Shigeru Ban, Toyo Ito, Kengo Kuma and Tadao Ando, the artist collective SKWAT has worked with graphic designer Satoshi Machiguchi and photographs by Daidō Moriyama in Milan, in collaboration with the sanitaryware company TOTO.

On the occasion of FuoriSalone 2022, the Gianfranco Ferré Research Center has opened to the public in the Tortona district. The space has been designed by Franco Raggi, Paola Bertola has been in charge of the scientific direction of the archive and the Fashion in Process collective of the coordination. The archive took shape in December 2021, following the Ferré family’s donation of the archive and the headquarters of the historic Gianfranco Ferré Foundation to the Milan Polytechnic, where the designer studied. Inside, more than 150,000 documents including sketches, technical drawings, photos, clothes and accessories, objects and books.

Exhibition galleries, production workshops, carpentry, robotics and advanced prototyping workshops. And then spaces for research, teaching, offices for designers and architects and a material library. All to be built on an area of 10,000 square metres in the 28 tunnels of the Magazzini Raccordati of Milano Centrale railway station. These, in short, are the agenda and the numbers of Andrea Caputo’s ambitious project for a Centre for Architecture and Design: previewed during Design Week, it will open its doors in 2024. It will be realised thanks to a €16 million investment by the real estate services company Nhood.

A new public artwork, Toiletpaper Street has changed the facades of the houses on Via Balzaretti with a long, colourful mural. It all began in 2019 with number 4 – the headquarters of Toiletpaper. A creative project by Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari, which, since then, has been nicknamed “the house of lipsticks”, thanks precisely to the large lipsticks gripped by male hands painted on the facade. Now, the project has involved the other facades of the street with new graphics created by the All Out Lab architecture studio too. For fans of the colourful and provocative visions of the Cattelan-Ferrari duo, it will be like walking through the oversized pages of their magazine.

The former Necchi sewing machine factory becomes part of the FuoriSalone this year, extending the boundaries of Design Week to Baranzate di Bollate, just beyond Milan. Inside, a collective of 21 Belgian galleries, designers and artists, coordinated by Lionel Jadot – founder of Zaventem Ateliers – with the support of Milanese architect Pietro Minelli. It took eight months of work to set up the exhibition on 3,000 square metres and it may not end there: Baranzate Ateliers could be the first step to suggest a future development, a permanent regeneration of this place that has been abandoned for 20 years.