What does 1990s New York have to do with a tech company’s headquarters in Madrid in 2026? Quite a lot, as it turns out — at least when Mil Studios is doing the thinking. The Madrid-based interior design practice, founded by Naroa Quirós and Juan Luis Medina, has completed Jungle’s new headquarters, and the result is one of the more considered — and straight-up cool — office interiors to land on our radar in a while.

The conceptual starting point is sharp and specific: the corporate offices and creative studios of 90s New York, where structure and culture existed in productive tension. Control and expression. Minimalism and character. It’s a reference that could easily tip into nostalgia, but Mil Studios handles it with exactness, translating that particular flavour of restrained, understated cool into something entirely contemporary.

Spanning 2,850 sqm across four floors of the Madnum tower, the project operates on a clear guiding principle: fewer elements, more intention. A monochromatic palette reinforces coherence across the whole, while each floor functions as its own distinct spatial manifesto — same system, different identity.

Floor 11 sets the tone with oxidised steel and curved geometries that deliberately fragment space, creating pockets of privacy and focus that push back against the tyranny of the open plan. Floor 12 shifts register entirely, referencing 90s club culture through colour gradients, aluminium surfaces, and music rooms with sinuous forms — a floor where work and social life are allowed to bleed into each other with controlled energy.

Floor 13, the reception and flexible work level, is where the decade’s early digital awakening gets its spatial moment. Brushed galvanised steel volumes organise the floor with an almost mathematical rigidity — the press release even cheekily references binary code (01001001) — while a reception area developed by yyplusplus reframes arrival as a discovery experience, bridging physical and digital worlds. Artworks sourced through Galería Alzueta and Galería Belmonte punctuate the steel-and-textile environment with welcome warmth.

Then there’s Floor 14 — the executive level — which is where the 90s magnate lifestyle reference really comes into its own. Continuous wood surfaces, noble materials, lighting designed to build anticipation and intrigue. It’s seductive in the best possible way: an office that also doesn’t feel like one.

Lighting is developed in three layers throughout — technical, ambient, and bespoke — calibrated to each floor’s identity. Acoustic comfort is woven in through textiles and sound-absorbing systems. And with an initial capacity for 230 people and room to scale to 400, the project is conceived as a modular system that can grow without losing its integrity.

Mil Studios has delivered something rare: a large-scale workplace that has a point of view.

If you’ve been following Hauvette & Madani for any length of time — and if you know us at Yellowtrace, you know we’ve been fans for a while — you’ll already understand that Samantha Hauvette and Lucas Madani have a particular gift. Their interiors feel lived-in before anyone has lived in them. Considered, warm, slightly cinematic. The kind of rooms that make you want to pour a glass of something good and just… be there.

Their latest residential project, Saint-Georges, is no exception. Spread across 240 square metres in Paris, the apartment was conceived from the outset as a home of dual nature: generous enough to entertain and receive, intimate enough to actually live in. Four levels, two atmospheres — and a material language that ties it all together with real elegance.

The entry sequence sets the tone immediately. On the ground floor, the rooms open into a generous reception and salon — a space conceived, quite deliberately, in the tradition of the decorative arts. Not functional, but theatrical. Not austere, but assured. Large panels of oak punctuate the architecture vertically, breaking the horizontality of the plan and lending each room its own rhythm.

The living room is where the curation really sings. A Maxime Old coffee table from 1969, sourced through Galerie Gastou, anchors the space with the kind of authority only genuinely great vintage design can muster. Lelièvre textiles in earthy Siena tones warm the palette, while the Gioiello wall lamps — a collaboration between Marine Breynaert and the studio — cast a considered glow. Vintage Murano lights do the same. It all feels curated rather than collected, which is very much the Hauvette & Madani way.

Move through the arched walnut portal and the mood shifts dramatically. The kitchen operates in a deeper register entirely — dense walnut cabinetry, a rubied wall hue drawn from Argile’s “ruby grape” reference, and precisely chosen marble details that give the room a grounded, almost jewel-box richness. Against the pale herringbone oak parquet that flows throughout the apartment, it reads as genuinely theatrical in the best possible way.

As the apartment rises, the atmosphere softens. The bedroom is a study in restraint — a custom oak and lacquer headboard, La Corbeille wall lamps from the studio’s own Entremets collection, natural textiles by Simrane layered with ease. Personal artworks are woven through every room, reintroduced as though they had always belonged, which lends Saint-Georges its particular sense of character. The bathrooms, meanwhile, extend the project’s understated luxury into every last detail — Alicante marble here, Verde Alpi there, timeless Ondyna fittings throughout.

Saint-Georges is a contemporary interpretation of French decorative tradition — sophisticated without stiffness, rich without excess. It’s a home shaped by craftsmanship and collaboration, and it reads like something conceived to endure rather than impress. Which is probably the highest compliment you can pay an interior.

It’s Hauvette & Madani, doing what they do best, and we’re not even slightly surprised.

If rue Pierre Fontaine has a long memory — and it absolutely does — then what Studio KO has done at 6 Rue Pierre Fontaine is less a renovation and more an act of architectural archaeology. The building that once housed the Bus Palladium, arguably the most gloriously chaotic nightclub in Paris history, has reopened in 2026 as a five-star hotel with 35 rooms and suites, a restaurant, a rooftop, and a 200-capacity underground club. The red neon sign is back on the façade. The dream is back on.

For the uninitiated: the Bus Palladium was the anti–private club that opened on 30 September 1965, the year of Satisfaction and Help!, when a 22-year-old idealist named James Arch lit up a white building in the 9th arrondissement and invited everyone — beatniks, suburbanites, artists, dancers — to come and mix. Salvador Dalí danced beneath its midnight-blue ceiling. Serge Gainsbourg wrote lyrics here. Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones played harmonica on its stage. It closed in July 2022 after 57 years.

The task of bringing it back fell to Studio KO — Karl Fournier and Olivier Marty, the Paris-Marrakech practice we’ve long considered among the finest architectural offices working anywhere in the world right now. Their portfolio speaks for itself: the Musée Yves Saint Laurent in Marrakech, the Château Marmont renovation in Los Angeles. At the Bus, they’ve delivered something that feels entirely of a piece with that body of work — rigorous, tactile, and shot through with serious personality.

The structural ambition alone is staggering. The two-storey building on a gap in the streetscape required excavation 14 metres underground to create 12 levels, including 4 below ground. On the façade, Studio KO chose restraint: a minimalist sandblasted surface engraved with discreet geometric patterns that echo the original building’s language without mimicking it. The move feels confident — knowing when not to shout is its own kind of intelligence.

Inside, the language shifts to something more cinematic and more sensual. Raw concrete ceilings sit against enveloping cork walls — a material Studio KO had previously explored in Francis Ford Coppola’s New York apartment — and powder-pink carpeting. Bathrooms are tiled entirely in Klein blue or dusty pink, glimpsed through a semi-transparent veil. Corduroy curtains reference the uniforms of 1970s road crews. And everywhere, small details extend the musical metaphor with real wit: switches designed to recall vintage amplifiers, door handles micro-perforated like microphone grilles. Nothing is incidental.

“The idea was to create contrasts and make it a place connected to its DNA, marked by a certain impertinence,” says Karl Fournier. That word — impertinence — does a lot of work here. It’s the thread that connects the Club-era kitsch Dalí once praised to the considered rawness Studio KO has brought to the interiors. The rooms are rich but never precious. The Dalí Suite features a modular DS-600 De Sede sofa, a foldaway bed set within a mirrored alcove, and an original balcony overlooking the neon sign. No two rooms are alike, with bedside tables functioning as transparent display cubes — stacked cassettes, book collections, miniature buses — curated with local record shop Ballade Sonores and collector Antoine Billore.

The restaurant continues Studio KO’s interior logic: a carpet patterned with psychedelic crystals creates the impression of looking through a kaleidoscope, at the centre of which sits a glass cube enclosing a fragment of untouched forest. It’s an image that manages to be both surreal and grounding — which is, of course, rather the point.

The broader project brings together a compelling cast. Caroline de Maigret serves as artistic director, programming four exclusive playlists on Ojas wooden speakers in every room and designing staff uniforms with Husbands — corduroy, flared high-waisted trousers, slim ties, and lacquered red belts threading the hotel’s signature colour throughout. Chef Valentin Raffali brings an ingredient-forward menu anchored in local sourcing. And nightlife figure Lionel Bensemoun oversees the underground club, Thursday to Saturday, midnight to 5am. Hotel guests get privileged access.

The Bus Palladium is not a hotel with a club, nor a club that decided to add rooms. It’s something harder to define and far more interesting — a place that co-owner and managing director Nicolas Saltiel describes as aiming for what the Chelsea Hotel represented for New York: chic, welcoming, creatively promiscuous. Studio KO have given that aspiration an architectural envelope worthy of it.

The red neon is lit. The Bus is back.

The second-hand clothing market has been building serious momentum for years now — but every so often, a retail space comes along that completely resets expectations. Swop’s fourth store in South Melbourne is one of those moments. Forget the musty op shop of your memory. Preloved has gone decidedly upmarket, and the fitout to prove it is something else entirely.

Designed in collaboration with designer William McRoberts — previously featured on these pages for his work on the Ellison Studios Sydney HQ — and Joseph Gardner of Studio Gardner, the South Melbourne space is Swop’s largest and most considered location to date. Gardner, widely recognised as one of Australia’s sharpest creative eyes — currently Style Editor at Vogue Living and a long-time collaborator of the design world’s best — brings the same exacting sensibility here that has defined his editorial and curatorial work elsewhere. The result is a space that feels less like a store and more like a well-edited environment you want to spend time in.

The mood is New York warehouse with a distinctly Melbourne inflection — raw, generous in scale, but never cold. Each interior element has been handpicked with the same rigour as the garments on the racks, including works by Annie Paxton, BMDO, Dalton Stewart and Olivia Bossy. Sourced from both local designers and vintage showrooms, including Fitzroy’s Castorina, the furniture reads like a design history lesson in the best possible way.

Highlights include a rare 1970s German inflatable sofa by Günter Sulz, François Colette’s Moveable Sculpture, and a 1960s sofa by Massimo and Lella Vignelli — the Italian couple who became legends of functional design. These are set against contemporary counterpoints: custom steel coffee tables from Galerie Terminus and 01.Bench, a piece by Rotterdam-based designer Johan Viladrich.

For Swop founder Brigid Gordon, the expansion to South Melbourne marks a meaningful milestone — a direct response to demand that had outgrown the brand’s Collingwood home. “With this new location, the goal was to create a unique space that instantly embraced everyone who entered,” said Gordon. “I hope that in evoking a sense of ease and welcome, Swop South Melbourne offers shoppers a small escape where their only focus is discovery.”

That ethos of discovery — slowing down, lingering, finding the unexpected — is baked into the spatial design itself. Swop has always operated with a distinctly European sensibility, buying directly from its community rather than relying on consignment models, and editing its curation with a level of intention that sets it well apart from the mainstream resale market. Since its founding in 2013, the brand has built a loyal following by treating preloved fashion with the same respect as anything newly made.

Architectural confidence comes in many different shapes and sizes. It can show up in the way a diagonal cuts across an otherwise conventional floor plan, or the way a mirror dissolves a wall rather than just reflecting one. Madrid studio Ba-rro has it in spades, and their residential project BV9 is a compelling example of what renovation can look like when it’s driven by ideas rather than convention.

At 160 square metres, BV9 is a four-bedroom, three-bathroom apartment that has been reconsidered from the inside out. Ba-rro’s approach goes well beyond cosmetic renewal — this is a project about rethinking how a home is inhabited. A bold diagonal move cuts through the original structure, disrupting inherited orthogonality and redirecting the way people move through the space. What were once hard boundaries soften into transitions. Doors become thresholds. Rooms shift their character depending on the time of day.

Without access to the original floor plan, it’s difficult to assess just how much the new layout improves on what was there before — but given the ambition of the intervention, one can only hope the spatial efficiency has been lifted to match.

The material thinking is considered. Wood — deployed here not in its rustic, natural-state form, but as a refined geometric abstraction — becomes almost industrial in its precision, bearing an unexpected kinship with stainless steel. It’s a striking conceptual pivot: taking a material loaded with warmth and organic association and stripping it back to pure plane and texture. The studio also uses mirrors with real spatial intelligence — applied strategically, they cause entire surfaces to visually dematerialise, expanding the perceived volume of the apartment without a single structural intervention.

Colour, meanwhile, is handled with admirable restraint. Used sparingly and deliberately, it punctuates the composition rather than dominating it — singularising spaces, marking edges where architecture alone leaves things ambiguous. The cumulative effect is calm rather than austere, visually alive without tipping into excess. It’s a balance that’s genuinely hard to achieve, and harder still to make look effortless.

“To renovate is not merely to correct,” Ba-rro write of the project. “It is to discover, to dismantle certainties, and to propose new ways of inhabiting.” That ethos is legible in every decision here — a home that respects its past while refusing to be constrained by it.

There’s a warmth to this project, a human quality, even as the geometry stays disciplined and the palette restrained. It sits somewhere between minimalism and something more empathetic — a place that feels as though it was designed for living rather than photographing. And that, in the end, is the highest compliment you can pay.

Occasionally, a brand does something so conceptually sharp that it stops you in your tracks. Sancal’s stand at Salone this year — officially called Experimentarium — carried a subtitle that demanded attention: “An antidote to cultural flattening.”

Rather than a product launch dressed up with a manifesto, Experimentarium is a thesis argued in three dimensions, conceived by Sancal’s art directors Esther and Elena Castaño-López as a direct response to what they call design’s drift toward homogenisation.

“Think, feel, wander… and experiment!” opens their manifesto. “With the goal of minimising risks, algorithms only reinforce what is already liked, turning creation into a process that trends toward homogenisation. This fear of making mistakes, of not being ‘liked’, leads to a silent self-censorship.”

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The spatial logic mirrored classical rhetoric. Visitors entered through an orange portico — striking columns that psychologically prepare tem for what Esther and Elena describe as “the paradigm shift found within.” The portico functions as an allegory of a classical temple, transporting visitors “to a time when dedicating time to philosophise before acting was the correct way to approach reality.”

Inside was the laboratory. Cool, neutral, analytical — five rooms recreating contemporary environments from lobby to workspace to intimate family room. Here, four new pieces anchor the argument through verbs: STOP, PLAY, START, CRAFT.

Mimoso by Note Design Studio embodies STOP. “Pausing is an act of subversion,” the manifesto declares. “Faced with the algorithm that kidnaps our time, stopping is the only way to recover silence.” The Swedish studio’s design reads as a visual metaphor — an XXL duvet dropped onto a firm base, all 1970s indulgence filtered through Note’s instinct for material contrast.

Tiptoe by Rafa García represents START. An existing sofa reimagined with new leg options — the original ultra-slim 1.6cm diameter alongside a chunkier 8cm version across Sancal’s full colour palette. “From walking on tiptoe… to leaving a mark,” as the designers put it.

Twins by Júlia Esqué embodies PLAY. The manifesto positions play as “mental cleansing” — the capacity to wonder, to experiment without fear of getting it wrong. “Discovery emerges genuinely,” the text explains, “breaking the inertia of the predictable.” The piece itself challenges conventional seating arrangements, encouraging users to approach furniture with curiosity rather than assumption.

Marc Morro’s Palma argues for CRAFT. “The manual and the artisanal as a celebration of the authentic,” positioning visible construction against what the manifesto calls “clinical digital surfaces.” Morro himself describes the optional cushion’s integration: “They are two generous volumes that fit into the structure without hiding it completely. The piece transitions from austerity to generosity.”

Note Design Studio sit on Mimoso, a 70s-inspired XXL duvet dropped onto a firm base, embodying STOP.

Marc Morro is seated on his Palma chair, which argues for CRAFT.

Twins by Júlia Esqué embodies PLAY. The manifesto positions play as “mental cleansing” — the capacity to wonder, to experiment without fear of getting it wrong.

But the climax is the Altar of Inspiration. After the laboratory’s analytical restraint, visitors emerge into a room where the floors, ceilings, and walls are bathed in an immersive orange glow. A five-link chain of Sancal’s iconic Link piece sits camouflaged in the centre, “symbolising the interconnection between all phases of creation.”

Throughout the week, dancers Sandra Egido and Iván Sier performed what they call “Experimentarium in Motion” — interacting with the furniture from alternative perspectives, challenging norms of use and celebrating freedom of movement.

What’s striking isn’t just the intellectual coherence, but also the courage required to argue rather than sell. In a design landscape increasingly driven by algorithmic feedback loops and safe choices, Experimentarium proposes that “all human progress, whether scientific or cultural, is based on risk and the courage of trial and error.”

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Most architects visit a project site. Klaus and Nicholas Carson Kelly, principals of Studio Carson Kelly, moved into theirs. For a full year, the pair lived inside the Victorian terrace that would become Little James — studying its light, its failures, its latent potential — before drawing a single line of the redesign. That decision shows.

Set in a leafy inner-city cul-de-sac in Sydney beside Centennial Park, the project takes a narrow terrace — less than four metres wide — and transforms it into something that repays close attention.

The planning logic is sharp. A dog-legged stair folds the laundry into its structure and dissolves redundant corridors entirely, so that movement becomes part of the architecture rather than something squeezed around it. Each first-floor bedroom occupies the full boundary-to-boundary width of the site. Nothing is wasted; nothing feels compromised.

Light is the project’s most powerful material. A boundary-to-boundary skylight at the centre of the plan draws daylight deep into what could easily read as a dark, compressed section. Clerestory glazing extends this further, ensuring the house seems to breathe differently from what its footprint suggests. By late afternoon, the light shifts and the spaces soften — new feels familiar, almost inevitable.

The material palette is tightly controlled and deliberately contrasted. A custom elongated brick format moves seamlessly from exterior to courtyard to interior built-ins, dissolving the threshold between inside and out. Underfoot, a patchwork terrazzo field catches light and shifts in tone across the day. The kitchen brings mirrored joinery up against stainless steel — reflective, functional, coherent — anchored by a floating stone slab that serves simultaneously as dining table, island, and social hub.

Bathrooms shift into something more immersive: stone wrapped and varied in scale across mosaic, elongated formats, and larger slabs. A circular glass brick aperture in the master bedroom filters light into a diffused glow. The master ensuite sits beneath a full skylight open to sky and tree canopy — a moment where interior and garden dissolve into each other entirely.

And then there’s the art and the styling — which deserve their own mention. The artwork choices are inspired and dynamic, introducing a joyful counterpoint to the architecture’s rigour. The photography by Dina Grinberg, styled by Nicholas Carson Kelly, captures the home with an effortless, lived-in quality — the kind of “just woke up like this” ease that makes a beautifully resolved space feel genuinely inhabitable and relatable, rather than untouchably perfect.

“Crafted on a site less than four metres wide, the project reframes constraint as clarity,” said Klaus and Nicholas Carson Kelly of Studio Carson Kelly. “Rather than resisting the narrow footprint, we embraced it — distilling the architecture to its essential moves.”

Little James is precisely that: essential moves, made with confidence.

What do you get when a Bratislava designer decides to smuggle a fragment of Italy into a heritage building in the Slovak capital? Something pretty special, as it turns out.

Olis is a new Italian restaurant in Bratislava, designed by local architect and interior designer Alan Prekop—the creative force behind a string of quietly compelling projects in this city. His conceptual premise here is elegant and a little audacious: rather than dressing the interior to look Italian, he inverted the spatial logic entirely. The interior becomes an exterior. Diners aren’t so much seated inside a restaurant as they are perched on an imagined Italian terrace—somewhere in the narrow streets of Naples or Bologna, where public life and private ease blur effortlessly into each other.

The space was stripped right back to its bones. Exposed brickwork and raw structural elements—revealed after removing layers of previous fit-outs—form the backdrop, functioning not as decoration but as the memory of the building itself. It’s a distinction worth making: this isn’t the affected rawness of a predictable industrial fit-out. The materiality here is quieter and more considered, a counterpoint to the lightness of everything layered on top.

And that layering is where Prekop’s hand really shows. Blue-and-white striped awnings—suspended from six slender stainless-steel rods within the window openings—do the conceptual heavy lifting. Visually, they dissolve the sense of enclosure and introduce a play of light and shadow that reads unmistakably as exterior. The effect is reinforced by festoon light garlands strung overhead, casting the kind of soft, diffused glow that makes even a midweek Tuesday feel like a long summer evening somewhere far from home.

The furnishings are deliberately, almost provocatively, unpretentious—white plastic garden chairs and verde granite tabletops sit together in a way that’s more Italian beach club than fine dining, which is entirely the point. A pizza counter clad in stacked San Marzano tomato cans and a mosaic-tiled wood-fired oven completes the picture with the right amount of wit and warmth.

For Bratislava, Olis feels like a small cultural intervention as much as a hospitality project—an interior that doesn’t try to be anywhere other than exactly what it is.

Stone, the good stuff, doesn’t ask for your attention. It earns it—slowly, quietly, over time. That’s precisely the philosophy behind the ST01 flagship store in Seoul, a 39-square-metre retail space near Hakdong Station designed by Order Matter Architects that manages to say everything about stone by saying almost nothing else.

ST01 is a Seoul-based architectural stone brand that works closely with Italian company Bagnara, curating materials that reveal depth over time rather than those that dazzle on first glance. Their motto—“Classic stone, nothing else”—gave Order Matter Architects a clear creative directive: make stone the protagonist, and let everything else recede.

The project opens with a sharp critique of how stone is typically presented in urban showrooms—as small samples, mounted vertically on walls, bathed in artificial light. None of that tells you what stone actually feels like at architectural scale.

Here, the design borrows its logic from museum archive storage systems. A ceiling-mounted rail system suspends large steel panels—each measuring 1,600 × 2,750mm—from which full stone slabs are displayed in metal frames detailed like glazing. The panels face the street, meaning the stone can be read from the footpath under natural southern light, or examined up close from within. It’s a genuinely clever solution to a genuinely frustrating problem.

For the space to work, every other element had to earn its place. The existing concrete structure was reclad and reorganised around a strict 300mm grid that unifies ceiling, walls, and floor. The storefront column is finished with the reverse face of Blue Grey stone—oxidised, raw, and tonally close to the surrounding concrete—creating a quiet threshold between street and interior. Metal fascias installed along the ceiling conceal the rail mechanism and mechanical services while drawing shadow lines that make the room read taller than it is.

Order and looseness coexist deliberately here. The floor takes the same 300mm grid logic but fragments it—stone pieces cut across a range of increments from 150mm to 900mm, with irregular offcuts reused as aggregate in the concrete infill. The result is a contemporary riff on traditional Italian palladiana flooring. Furniture from Order Matter’s own label, As Found—the sinuous Silhouette table and Node stools, cast in polished aluminium—introduce a sculptural counterpoint to the matte stone surfaces throughout.

One of the early references for the project was the small bookshop, The Travel Book Co., from the film Notting Hill—a shop filled with travel books, where visitors browse and converse about destinations and stories. A similar atmosphere was imagined for this address on Nonhyeon-dong’s material street: visitors who come to select stone engage in conversation with ST01 about the character and possibilities of each material.

At just 39 square metres, this is retail design working at the edge of its own constraints. As Order Matter Architects put it: “Rather than a conventional retail showroom, this small flagship store operates as an urban archive where materials selected through ST01’s criteria briefly reside before moving on to their next destination.”

Bedroom by David and Nicolas at Nilufar Depot, featuring exquisite hand-embroidered De Gournay ‘Waltz’. Photo: Felix Speller.

Rebecca Moses, Etereo Design & Lucia Massari at Nilufar Depot. Photo: Filippo Pincolini.

Milan-based Polish designer Daniel Kolodziejczak, aka Studio Daniel K, at Le Pied À Terre Cosmopolite at Nilufar Spiga. Photo: Filippo Pincolini.

The ground floor of Nilufar Depot was transformed into an immersive, delicious environment dubbed ‘Nilufar Grand Hotel’. Photo: Alejandro Ramirez Orozco.

cc-tapis x Fornasetti exhibition (META)FISICA was a banger! Curated by Dan Thawley with exhibition design by Pablo Molezún. Photo: Giulio Ghirardi.

The newly opened Dimoregallery sits inside an old bank on Via San Vittore al Teatro. Photo: Andrea Ferrari.

Fluid Re-Collection solo show by Linde Freya Tangelder in collaboration with Cassina at 10 Corso Como. Photo: courtesy of Linde Freya Tangelder.

Kelly Wearstler did not fuck around (duh!) and went all out for her Milan debut — a collaboration with H&M Home unveiled at Palazzo Acerbi.

Kelly Wearstler x H&M Home.

Camera Fissa installation by Studioutte x De Troupe. Photo: Giulio Ghirardi.

Nokori by Giopato & Coombes.

“Silhouettes: Celebrating 15 Years” by Muller Van Severen unveiled a collection of 15 unique, life-sized, human-scale candelabras produced in collaboration with Apartamento.

Massimiliano Locatelli took over the cocktail bar SiMa Townhouse with fantastic colourful mosaics. Photo: Giulio Ghirardi.

My favourite discovery from the whole week was Sarah Espeut. Gasp! Photo: Maxime Verret.

Delicate, previous wall sculptures from Act Of A Line by Marijke De Cock at Alcova.

Polish Modernism: A Struggle For Beauty by Visteria Foundation, curated by Federica Sala & Anna Maga.

From left to right: Sema Topaloglu Studio, Pani Jurek Studio and Elisa Uberti at Alcova.

Reading Room By Sophie Dries For Isse at Alcova 2026.

Seat In Touch by Supaform at Alcova 2026.

I almost didn’t go this year.

The cost of travel, the economics of running a business, the exhaustion of sixteen years of unrelenting Milan production schedules, and the fact that I’d just come out of the launch of Sightline—a half-day design intelligence briefing in Sydney and Melbourne that already contained most of what I had to say about the state of design. I didn’t think I needed to be physically there.

But sometime in late March, I got a feeling I couldn’t shake. Go alone. See it by yourself. No crew, no Milantrace production, no co-piloting of any kind. Just me on the ground, with a packed itinerary I’d designed entirely for myself.

So that’s what I did. Nine nights in Milan, alone for the first time since my first trip in 2010, sixteen years later. I didn’t know what to expect at first, and the initial uneasiness turned into the most enjoyable, clarifying, and consequential Milan trip I’ve had. I could really SEE.

Two important notes before we begin. Firstly, I enjoy the privilege of hard-earned access and refuse to line up for anything in Milan. Period. Secondly, my week ran smoothly thanks to a custom itinerary tool I’ve been trialling — built around many years of militant Milan navigation. It handled the logistics beautifully so I could focus on the looking. I’ll say more about that another time.

But before I get into what I saw — let me tell you what I was looking for.

Milan Design Week means different things to different people. For some, it’s about brands, agents, sales, connections. For others, it’s a junket, a free trip, a content factory, a place to be seen. For me, it’s none of those. I come here because I’m hungry for design. Keen to learn. Curious as fuck. I’m interested in what makes design and designers better, and where the exciting new things actually live. I don’t care if I find it in an emerging designer’s first show or in an established legacy house, in a working studio or in a 1930s villa. I only care that the work is good, that the ideas and materials are pushing somewhere, that the thinking has weight.

“Honest critique is what love looks like when there’s something at stake. Politeness, in this context, is the least kind thing we can do.” —Dana Tomić Hughes

The most honest design conversations of my entire week didn’t happen at shows.

They happened in my DMs. In text messages. In private conversations at Bar Basso at 1 AM, where designers and peers leaned in to share what they actually thought about brands, installations, each other, the year. Truths almost no one is willing to say in public, because the ecosystem we work inside has been engineered to punish honesty.

Dealers and designers depend on the brands. Press depends on the advertisers. Influencers depend on access. Almost everyone whose income touches design has a direct or indirect financial reason to say nice things to the people making the work. So when a brand insists everyone loved their new collection, what they often mean is: everyone whose income depends on us said nice things to our faces.

But that’s not real feedback. That’s a feedback loop. Like the dreaded algorithm that keeps dishing out more of the same…

The result is that politeness gets confused for positivity, dissent gets engineered out of the system, and honesty gets pushed into private channels — encrypted threads and conversations between people who trust each other enough to risk telling the truth. Honesty absolutely exists, but only where the system can’t punish it.

This is the structural condition that produced Milan 2026 (and most of the design these days, tbh). It’s also the condition that’s been producing the calcification I spoke of last year — the archive-mining, the marketing-machine ascendancy, the mostly hollow fashion-into-design crossovers, the all-encompassing gimmickry, etc. Calcified industries don’t reform themselves. They need outside pressure. And the only pressure that works in a creative field is the pressure of honest seeing — practitioners and editors who refuse the polite fiction.

I’ve spent sixteen years staying close to designers and out of PR circles, partly by instinct and partly by design. I think it’s why people have trusted me to be honest with them and about them. If I didn’t care, I wouldn’t bother showing up. I show up because I care. Honest critique is what love looks like when there’s something at stake. Politeness, in this context, is the least kind thing we can do.

This is the lens I want to bring to the rest of this piece. (If you choose to stay, it’s a long one — don’t say I didn’t warn you!)