Wallpaper* Travel Guides are back

At Wallpaper*, there is a decided buzz ahead of Salone del Mobile and the wider Milan Design Week. We discuss the events all year long, we plan our routes weeks in advance, we spend our days talking to our Milanese and international friends about their plans, their projects, and their installations. To help you navigate to the highlights, we have created a map of some of the exhibitions we are most excited about visiting, ranging from celebrations of design history giants to creative installations by new-guard pioneers.

Plot your route to Nilufar Depot’s immersive grand hotel experience with bedrooms by David/Nicolas, Filippo Carandini, Bethan Laura Wood and Allegra Hicks; Salone Raritas, a new collectible design platform launching in a space designed by Formafantasma; future-facing Alcova; and much more, not forgetting coffee at Marni’s Pasticceria Cucchi pop-up (also see our guide to creatives’ favourite Milan coffee shops – refuelling is going to be essential). 

Architecture Research Office has created a new visitor centre for a Brooklyn cemetery that’s a historic and cultural magnet for the living, hosting events and activities, from birdwatching and performances to workshops and festivals, including those that engage with mortality.

Green-Wood was founded in 1838, as both burial ground and public landscape, a place where life and death might coexist: as much for promenades and carriage rides as for mourning. Since a period of decline in the 20th century, the cemetery, today a Historic National Landmark and accredited arboretum, has been reanimated. As public offerings expanded and annual visitation climbed into the hundreds of thousands, a new, welcoming point of entry was envisaged.

‘You can’t easily get people to walk through cemetery gates – no matter how elegant – because of a natural fear of confronting loss,’ says Green-Wood president Meera Joshi. ‘We needed something to demystify the experience – a gentler transition onto the grounds.’ Join Anna Fixsen for a tour of a very fitting solution, including a second life for a historic greenhouse.

When the Milanese gallerist Marta Sala founded her namesake company, Marta Sala Éditions, in 2015, it was a deliberate pivot. After two decades within her family’s firm, Azucena – founded by her uncle, the architect Luigi Caccia Dominioni, alongside Ignazio Gardella and Corrado Corradi Dell’Acqua – she set out to build a platform dedicated to limited-run collections rooted in architectural rigour and material precision. ‘I defend beauty as the primary objective: a beauty that arises from the purity of an idea, from functional necessity, from the excellence of line and proportion, and from the mastery of its execution,’ she says of her approach.

Eleven years on, her vision has been entirely realised – in no small part thanks to her longstanding collaborations with some of the most exacting figures in design. As Sala returns to one of her earliest and most enduring partnerships, Lazzarini & Pickering, and releases a new collection with Herzog & de Meuron at the inaugural Salone Raritas in Milan, she speaks with Laura May Todd about collectible design, this year’s Salone del Mobile, and her hopes for the industry moving forward.

Never mind dancing on the table, American artist Dozie Kanu’s new tables for Knoll will dance with you. Fringed with leather tassels that swish and sway, the console, coffee and side tables nod to inspirations including a Nigerian drum and Texan cowboy jackets. It’s a collection sure to get the party started when it debuts at Milan Design Week.