This article is part of our Design special report previewing Milan Design Week.
Bouncing off glossy metal, being devoured by voluptuous fabrics or pouring out of lamp heads, light is always a design star. At Milan Design Week, it makes a conspicuous presence in the reflective surfaces of Michele De Lucchi’s revived mirrors for Memphis Milano or passing through the crystalline bodies of Kiki Goti’s Graces vases. It should also be thanked for revealing the voluptuous textures of textiles like Richard Hutten’s exuberant floor coverings for Jaipur Rugs.
Design That Sparks Positivity
Michele De Lucchi — a member of the Memphis Group collective founded by Ettore Sottsass in 1980 — believes it’s time to bring back the creative movement’s free-wheeling spirit, which woke up the world with its Greco-Roman references and exuberant colors and shapes teetering between kitsch and innovation.
“With Memphis, we wanted to be extreme and create the most vibrant atmosphere,” said Mr. De Lucchi, 73. “We need that exaggeration now. Design makes us feel more optimistic. It should be a law for every nation of the world to be positive.”
In 1985, under the Memphis Milano name, he designed two versions of a table mirror as promotional gifts for the newly launched women’s fashion magazine Donna. (The mirror, he pointed out, is “something between fashion and design.”) Memphis then added the designs to its catalog.
Both mirrors are being revived this year by Italian Radical Design, which purchased Memphis Milano in 2022. Dorian is a circle of glass that rotates within a vertical painted wood slab in the shape of a square; Ionian is a square mirror hinged within a circle. Both have orange bases.
The mirrors will be presented at the Salone del Mobile from Tuesday through Sunday in Pavilion 22, stand B30; memphis.it. — ARLENE HIRST
Shaping Glass Into Family Portraits
Kiki Goti alluded to women in her own family when she designed her Graces vase collection, being shown at the Alcova fair during Milan Design Week.
“The Muses embrace the arts more straightforwardly,” said the architect and designer, who was born in Thessaloniki, Greece, and lives and works in New York City. “But the Graces represent beauty, charm, and joy in a way that is fluid and ethereal, allowing for all kinds of femininity to exist within them.”
That diversity can be seen in the shape and ornamentation of the objects, which are connected to the qualities of a few close relatives. The narrowest vase embodies one of Ms. Goti’s aunts, a tall, career-driven businesswoman who loves fashion and jewelry. The rotund vase represents a grandmother whom Ms. Goti described as well-rounded and “empathetic but in a very loud way.” And the four-legged vase with its elaborate crown pays tribute to her mother’s exuberant personality.
To create the jewel-like encrustations at the tops of the vases, Ms. Goti employed rostrato, a technique developed on the Venetian island of Murano, in which molten glass is pinched and then peppered with small bits of ruby- or amber-colored glass.
The Graces collection is part of “A Human Touch,” an installation about the happy marriage of industry and artistry, which also includes the Osvaldo furniture collection by the Office of Tangible Space, a New York architectural studio.
The exhibition is on view Monday through Sunday at the Villa Borsani, 148 Via Umberto I, Varedo, Italy; kikigoti.com. — YELENA MOROZ ALPERT
Décor That Is Meant to Endure
Lucia Neamtu’s decision to design mirrors was very strategic. She believed the current offerings in the category, especially large examples, were lacking. She also knew that if she presented a 6-foot-tall mirror, “people would take selfies and tag,” she said. Which is exactly what happened when she first showed at the Alcova fair during Milan Design Week two years ago. “Everybody was calling me the mirror girl,” she recalled.
Ms. Neamtu was born in Moldova and raised in Milan. She briefly studied fashion design and interior design and was accepted at Central Saint Martins in London for product design; but she found life in New York City an education all its own, and that was where she settled.
“In Europe we are taught that as designers we have to learn how to do everything,” she said. “What I learned in America is you can hire people to do things for you. You have a vision, you get a team. I found someone to do 3-D for me and I started making furniture.”
Long fascinated by the marble quarries and craftsmen in Carrara, Italy, she wanted to make tangible objects that would endure for generations. “That is why I chose stone,” she said. “There could be an earthquake or your house burns down, but stone will still be there.” Carrara sits near the Ligurian Sea; the undulations carved into her mirror designs are meant to be an interpretation of waves.
This year, Ms. Neamtu will return to Alcova to show a new mirror, two tables, a floor lamp and a sconce. The lighting is a combination of marble and glass that is hand-blown in Venice, and part of a larger collection she will launch later in the year.
The collection will be shown Tuesday through Sunday at Alcova, Villa Bagatti Valsecchi, 48 Via Vittorio Emanuele II, Varedo, Italy; alcova.xyz. — RIMA SUQI
These Rugs Are an Inspired Bunch
Karl Fournier, a co-founder of Studio KO, an architectural firm with offices in Paris and Marrakesh, Morocco, doesn’t usually find design inspiration while doing homework with his son. Yet a wide-ruled notebook with blue lines and red margins managed to find its way into his carpets for the rug company Beni.
“My idea was to make a design from this and bring it to the traditional way of weaving and see what happens,” he said.
Mr. Fournier founded Studio KO with Olivier Marty 25 years ago, and both men count themselves among a generation for whom ideas come to mind by way of the hand and not the screen.
Their 10-piece Intersection collection, shown at Milan’s design week, is an ode to the extremely old-fashioned, which means more than just notebooks.
Some of the designs were accomplished through the 500-year-old method for making R’bati rugs that uses a dense knot structure to enhance the clarity of delicate linear patterns.
“Imagine the difference between a hand-drawn charcoal sketch and a finely inked illustration — both beautiful, but one allows for sharper lines and more refined shading,” said Robert Wright, a founder of Beni, which is based in Morocco. Adopting another R’bati technique, the designers dipped into hues of paprika and saffron.
This remarkable level of detail allows these rugs to be “a little bit quiet,” Mr. Fournier said. “They are not too heavy or full of information,” so they can be imagined in any kind of interior.
The rugs can be seen in a Studio KO-designed installation in a former textile shop at 14 Cesare Correnti, from Monday through Friday; benirugs.com. — YELENA MOROZ ALPERT
Rugs, With a Sense of Humor
The last thing you want to see on a rug is a banana — that is, unless Richard Hutten is the one who dropped it there. The Dutch designer, who is known for his sense of humor, has put a spin on the antique craft of hand-woven Indian carpets with his nine-piece collection for Jaipur Rugs, called “Playing With Tradition.”
Mr. Hutten started with classic floral motifs in Indian carpets whose beauty he said he admired, but added what he described as “an extra layer” to make them contemporary and optimistic.
His first experiments involved dropping in balloon and egg shapes. These fell flat, quite literally. “Each knot is like a pixel of a picture,” he said, so he sprinkled higher-resolution images like bananas and confetti over the traditional patterns. (The confetti’s vivid colors are reminiscent of a Holi festival.) In another rug, a variety of cubic forms seem to levitate above the botanical background. “Only very strong shapes worked within my concept,” he said.
The wool-and-silk rugs are hand-knotted in the state of Rajasthan.
“Playing With Tradition” will be exhibited Monday through Sunday at the Jaipur Rugs showroom at 8 Via Marco Minghetti; jaipurrugs.com. — YELENA MOROZ ALPERT
A Blanket for Your Wild Side
Liucija Kostiva’s Secret Garden blanket does indeed contain a secret. At a glance, it seems like a lovely cotton jacquard throw, with a pattern inspired by Persian carpet motifs and composed of various geometric shapes meant to evoke the topiaries of European gardens.
The secret is cleverly hidden behind the larger shapes — but users will have to disfigure the blanket in order to experience it as intended. Simply put: They will have to use scissors to cut a vertical line through the center of each topiary to reveal the “secret animal” hidden beneath, which will be surrounded by a fringe after the surgery. The creatures include chickens, roosters, snakes, pigs, foxes, crows and rabbits; instructions on how to customize the blanket are included in the packaging.
According to Ms. Kostiva, a textile designer who currently lives in Moliakalnis, a village in Lithuania, gardens play a crucial role in Persian carpets. They are a “symbol of a place where you can come to reconnect with yourself,” she said.
Her seemingly complicated, multilayered design is woven in one pass through a loom. It took her about 10 months to create the program and weaving technique, as well as to develop the technology to ensure that the severing of the yarns wouldn’t leave holes or messy places. (The blanket is machine washable and, Ms. Kostiva said, the yarns will not fall off or stretch.)
She expressed a hope that buyers wouldn’t overthink cutting it up. “You shouldn’t take it seriously. It’s reconnecting with the wild side of yourself,” she said. “But yes, if you don’t like snakes, it could be a problem.”
The Secret Garden blanket will be displayed Monday through Sunday at the “Tactile Baltics” exhibition at the Palazzo Litta, 24 Corso Magenta; kostiva.com, tactilebaltics.com. — RIMA SUQI
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