This article is part of our Design special report previewing Milan Design Week.
To visit Milan during the Salone del Mobile is like meeting someone for the first time on their wedding day. The city is polished, prepped and dressed to the nines, while simultaneously being mobbed by guests snapping photos and swigging cocktails. Obscured are the simple rhythms that define life here day to day — the quiet hum of neighborhood cafes and the steady pace of artisans at work.
But the design showcase Convey, now in its third year, aims to highlight both up-and-coming brands as well as the spaces often overlooked during the world’s largest furniture fair.
Its locale is the quiet Via Rosolino Pilo. The narrow corridor in the Porta Venezia neighborhood — running from the busy crossroads of Piazza Otto Novembre to Via Nino Bixio and teeming with modern restaurants — is a palimpsest of modern Milan.
There are Art Nouveau-style buildings from the early 20th century, their faded facades carved with curling leaves, alongside midcentury icons like the gridded exterior of number 9, designed in 1956 by the architect and industrial designer Joe Colombo, best known for his space-age-style furniture.
The street’s commercial residents are equally varied. Amid the longstanding woodworkers, hair salons and family-run trattorias are more recent tenants, like the pocket-size store Nakama, selling sake imported from Japan, or the contemporary art gallery Limbo, only a few months old.
“Via Rosolino Pilo is a village,” said Riccardo Crenna, the co-founder, alongside Simona Flacco, of the creative agency Simple Flair, who founded Convey in 2023 as a platform to showcase contemporary design. “We thought, since Convey is a project where brands connect, we’d like to try to create a connection between us and the historical businesses on the street.”
The first two editions took place in the Lancetti district, an often overlooked former industrial zone on the city’s northern periphery, where they took over the showroom of a fashion conglomerate with 20 brands exhibiting new collections. This year, however, they wanted to shift the focus to the city center and have chosen Via Rosolino Pilo as their stage.
On a dreary day in mid-March, an oppressive gray mist hung above the city, soon to dissolve into stunning blue when the long-anticipated Italian spring arrived in a few days. Mr. Crenna, tall, fair and wrapped in a quilted army-green jacket, and Ms. Flacco, whose short, dark hair barely grazed her ears, and who wore an oversized gray hooded sweatshirt, were making their rounds among the traditional businesses and contemporary studios that will take part in Convey’s 2025 edition.
There was the wood-lined barbershop, founded in the 1980s by Giuseppe Reschi, who recounted in detail the story of his emigration from Puglia to Milan while a smart-looking man in a felt hat and gray peacoat patiently waited his turn for a trim. Here, the New York City company Ready To Hang planned to install a few of its latest mirrors — the rounded, chrome-toned Gotchi and the hourglass-shaped Squeeze — which Mr. Reschi will use throughout the week for his regular customers. Save for April 9, when he will provide trims free of charge for curious Convey visitors.
A few doors down was Arte & Gesso Arreda, an artisan producer of plaster wall and ceiling decoration, where Elisabetta Letizia has worked since 1997. Originally from Salento, in southern Italy, she was employed at a hospital before joining her partner in the business. In the workshop, where a fine layer of snow-white dust clung to surfaces like confectionery sugar, the natural stone company Sfrido Estate will display its marble pedestal-like Museum tables among the intricately decorated plaster medallions and rows of cornices lining metal shelves.
At number 16 was the woodworker Giampiero Romanò, an expert in restoring modern and antique furniture. Mr. Romanò’s studio will exhibit both his own designs — baroque-inspired mirrors that have been spliced, shattered and artfully reassembled — and several pieces from his impressive collection of midcentury furniture, in a shop-front gallery next to his studio.
Convey’s main location, however, will take over a street-facing storefront and an expansive, light-filled studio — used throughout the year as the fashion brand Durazzi’s showroom. Here, it will host about two dozen projects from both emerging and established companies.
There will be the Swiss woodworkers Woak, showing the Nervosa chair by Francesco Faccin, inspired by traditional south Tyrolean seating, and a new stool by the Venice studio Zaven. A company called From Lighting, founded in 2018, in Padua, will debut an anodized aluminum adjustable suspension lamp by Studio Brynjar & Veronika. Heritage businesses also have signed on. The furniture company Meritalia, founded in 1987, will show a new edition of Gaetano Pesce’s Nubola armchair, originally designed in 2007.
Mr. Crenna and Ms. Flacco have been advising and promoting similar Italian and international companies since founding Simple Flair in 2010. The couple met a few years earlier, in the architecture program at the Polytechnic University of Milan. But early on, they realized their interests lay more with making connections than designing spaces.
“We are both architects,” said Mr. Crenna, who explained that they use that expertise to bridge the gap between design and storytelling. Recent projects have included the creative direction of an advertising campaign for the Swedish design company Hem and a collaboration with the New York fashion label Colbo on a line of limited-edition household goods. “When we speak to clients, we understand, for example, how their table is made,” he said. “But we also know how to talk about it.”
Their first project, The Simple Flair Apartment, operated both as their home and an ever-changing design showroom. Furnishings were supplied by their clients — Vitra, Molteni&C, and USM — to be captured on their own social media channels and experienced in person during brand-sponsored dinners and networking events. Next month , they are planning their first international edition — a Manhattan apartment that will open during New York’s design week.
It wasn’t long before they went from advising brands to creating them. In 2021, the pair teamed up with Pasquale Apollonio, a Puglia-based furniture entrepreneur, to start a company from scratch. The result was Vero International, a line that couples the artisan know-how of Apollonio’s craftspeople with Simple Flair’s youthful, contemporary aesthetics. Designs — often colorful, with playful, sculptural forms — are commissioned from emerging designers, including Federica Elmo, CaraDavide and Natalia Criado.
They also created a physical space to foster these ideas. In 2019, they founded Riviera, a glass and concrete gallery carved out of the Lapalma furniture showroom. Here, they stage solo exhibitions of contemporary designers, book launches and group shows, often organized around a distinct theme. For a recent show, titled “Burrocrazia,” they asked 10 designers to reinterpret the humble butter dish.
Convey, at its core, is an amalgam of all these endeavors. It’s a physical space for seeing new work in person. It acts as an incubator for emerging companies, helping them navigate a notoriously difficult industry. And for the casual visitor, it offers the allure of a thoughtfully curated exhibition.
“There are very commercial events that sell well but are not very culturally significant, and on the other hand, there are interesting, cultural events that are less commercial,” said Mr. Crenna, who sees Convey as an intermediary point between the high-budget spectacle of the Salone del Mobile and the collectible design showcase Alcova. “Convey’s goal is to be both.”
But some longtime observers are weary of the attention Milan Design Week — the citywide festival also known as the Fuorisalone that is anchored by the Salone del Mobile — can bring to fragile local ecosystems.
“From the 2010s onward, the Fuorisalone was a force to drive people, even the Milanese, to discover new places and ideas,” said the design journalist and critic Laura Traldi. She pointed to the example of Lambrate, a postindustrial neighborhood in the city’s northeast periphery, which from 2010 to 2020 was the site of the Ventura Lambrate design district. “For a time, it was a good thing. Many new places opened,” Ms. Traldi said. “And that was thanks to the Fuorisalone.”
However, once local property owners became aware of the elevated prices they could charge visiting design brands for a single week of rent many of the neighborhood’s permanent creative spaces were soon priced out. In 2017, for example, the Swedish furniture giant IKEA rented out an entire warehouse in the area for all of design week.
“It’s not the fault of Fuorisalone alone,” added Ms. Traldi, “but anything that gentrifies the city and creates more hype without substance is to blame.”
Despite the influx of international visitors during design week, Via Rosolino Pilo will likely retain its usual atmosphere on a typical spring evening. Locals will mill and chat on the sidewalk outside the wine bar Vineria Eretica, glasses in hand, as shopkeepers pull down their metal shutters and lock up for the night.
“We’re a small neighborhood. We’re all family here,” said Ms. Letizia, the plaster artist. “Things have changed over the years but the street is always full of life.”
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