The Milan Design Week 2025 update

Milan Design Week highlights innovative furniture, lighting, and installations, showcasing global craftsmanship and sustainable materials.

Milan Design Week (MDW) spread across Milan, has two components — the Salone del Mobile and the Fuorisalone. The Salone del Mo bile (Milan Furniture Fair) has its venue at Fiera Milano exhibition district in Rho, a suburb of Milan. It’s the largest furniture fair in the world, this time with 2100 exhibitors from 37 countries. Fuorisalone began spontaneously since the 1980s, when exhibitors extended events ‘outside the Salone’. The fair, which ran from April 8 to 13 this year, dazzled both visitors and participants with its scale and focus on craftsmanship.

In a world increasingly empowered by AI, designers and artists are becoming tangibly aware of the sentient qualities of being human — passion, pride, love, anguish and sorrow — and it’s this sentiment that prevailed in the 63th edition of Milan Design Week and its theme, ‘Thought for Humans’.

“Milan completely transformed into a city of design. It felt like every street corner was telling a story. The whole city came together beautifully, and it was inspiring to see art and design take over in such a powerful way,” says Prateek Jain. Jain and Gautam Seth, his co-founder at Klove Studio, are participating for the first time as Klove. The duo was taken aback by the response for VISTA, a collection of sculptural lights created by NYC designer Kickie Chudikova with Klove Studio for the Shakti Design Residency.

Multiple concentric glass shades in scalloped forms derived from shapes of Mughal arches, create gradients within a chosen hue from glazed caramel and sensuous reds to sapphire blue. There’s a sense of containment, mimicking dwellings for light from bygone eras.

Meanwhile, designer Vikram Goyal, who is passionate about interpreting artisanal craftsmanship, presented a selection of pieces for Nilufar Depot made of brass and hollowed joinery. Goyal brings his architectural forms to life with the metalworking craft of repousse, hammering and welding sheets to create textures and patterns in his stunning Shaded Graphite collection.

“The show-stopper was the three-part Mesa console,” he says, commenting on this revived take of his console piece at PAD London. Nilufar is showing Goyal’s work for the third consecutive year at MDW.

Another brand, Phantom Hands from Bengaluru, brought their meticulous revival of Geoffrey Bawa’s furniture, a tribute to the late Sri Lankan-based architect’s humanistic approach. The licensed re-editions, which comprise of lighting, objects and furniture made by Bawa between the mid 1960s and 1990s, were often for buildings he designed.