From exhibitions to pop-ups and fairs, consider this your definitive guide to this year’s Milan Design Week.
Last spring, I was sitting in a quiet Milanese courtyard with a Negroni Sbagliato, watching the late afternoon light stretch across worn stone. Next to me, a designer sketched furiously. “It’s either genius or a logistical nightmare,” they muttered as their friend glanced up from a cigarette, unimpressed. It wasn’t part of the official program, but that’s how Milan Design Week works—the best moments happen between the scheduled ones, on side streets and spontaneous conversations, in places that don’t need a star-studded guestlist to matter.
To navigate the week well is to accept that you will miss more than you see. The trick is knowing where to linger and when to leave. The usual landmarks of good design—Salone’s sprawling halls, the impossibly chic showrooms in Brera—are just the starting point. But the real Milan is in the details: the perfect curve of a 1930s door handle, the way a terrazzo floor catches the afternoon light, the effortless precision of a well-set table.
The city’s offerings aren’t always on the schedule. It might require being pulled into a side-street atelier by an octogenarian craftsman who still believes in making things by hand. It’s the dinner that starts with an apéritivo at Bar Basso and somehow ends at a private palazzo, arguing about Gio Ponti with a stranger. This guide isn’t about hitting every marquee event; it’s about knowing which ones are actually worth your time—and leaving space for the beautiful, unscripted moments that make Milan, Milan.
Consider this your map to the week’s musts: the exhibitions worth the detour, the booths worth a second look, and the installations that will stay with you long after the dreaded flight home.L’Appartamento by Artemest
Palazzo Donizetti, Via Gaetano Donizetti | April 8-13, 2025Nilufar
Multiple locations | April 8–13, 2025ALCOVA
For its ninth edition, ALCOVA expands its reach across four extraordinary locations in Varedo, deepening its exploration of space, history, and design. Alongside the modernist masterpiece Villa Borsani and the grand Villa Bagatti Valsecchi, this year introduces the Pasino Glasshouses—once home to one of Europe’s largest white orchid cultivations—and the former SNIA Factory, a vast industrial relic softened by time and nature. Each site offers a distinct atmosphere, guiding visitors through an immersive journey of site-specific installations and experimental exhibitions that push the boundaries of contemporary design. A fixture since 2018, Alcova remains a platform for those redefining how we live, create, and interact with the spaces around us.
Multiple locations | April 7-13, 2025Vero
Vero returns to Milan Design Week with a new collaboration featuring Italian designer Federica Elmo, bringing her signature material experimentation and sculptural forms into the brand’s ever-growing universe. This year’s showcase reactivates the space at Via Felice Casati, turning it into a meeting ground for designers, collectors, and the aesthetically-curious. Expect a blend of contemporary Italian craftsmanship and radicalism, where unexpected textures and bold silhouettes redefine the boundaries of functional design.
Via Felice Casati, 3 | April 8-13, 2025Cassina
Marking 60 years of producing the Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret, Charlotte Perriand Collection, Cassina stages a bold intervention at Teatro Lirico Giorgio Gaber conceived by Formafantasma. More than a retrospective, the installation interrogates the tension between Modernist ideals and today’s ecological realities, moving beyond industrial rationalism toward a wilder, more organic future. A fully immersive experience unfolds throughout the week, with a performance directed by Fabio Cherstich, featuring commissioned texts by Emanuele Coccia, Andrés Jaque, and Feifei Zhou—challenging how we see, inhabit, and evolve within the legacy of design.
Via Larga, 14, | April 7–13, 2025REdDUO
REdDUO, the brainchild of Fabiola Di Virgilio and Andrea Rosso, lands in Porta Venezia, embedding itself in Milan’s most vibrant creative neighborhood. The project—part gallery, part laboratory—celebrates Italian heritage through meticulously crafted ceramics, textiles and homeware. This pop-up presence is a prelude to Casa REdDUO, the duo’s future permanent residence and studio, where their vision of design as a living, breathing dialogue between past and present will take full shape.
Porta Venezia, Milan | By appointment only | April 8-13, 2025CABANARANIERI
Alcova, ex SNIA Factory, 20814, Varedo | April 7–13, 2025Gufram
Salone del Mobile, Fiera Milano, Rho, Stand 22P/B30 | April 9–13, 202Buccellati
Piazza Tomasi di Lampedusa, Milan | April 8–13, 2025Google
Garage 21, Via Archimede, 26 | April 8–13, 2025Fornasetti
Fornasetti plays with scale and surrealism, shrinking the grandeur of 16th-century architecture and celestial maps into everyday objects.
