As we return to our digital format, this issue isn’t what you would typically expect from our Milan or June edition. We’re exploring Milan’s halo effect: the lustre that comes when crowds convene for Milan Design Week and Salone del Mobile.Milano, but also beyond the week and its borders.
Designer Giampiero Tagliaferri puts it perfectly on page 62: Milan lives and breathes “creative contamination”—between what has existed for centuries, its rich interior design tradition and the contemporary. This layering and tension, he adds, are at the heart of Italian design, and the four homes in this issue. We enter a 1920s apartment carved from a former Palazzo and restored by Thomas Zangaro Studio, while in a Tuscan olive grove, a farmhouse comes alive with Crosby Studios’ glinting, industrial details.
Private access to Milan’s homes and design studios, some for the first time, was where the most memorable presentations were held this year, making their way into the 25 highlights, and providing the setting for so many of our designer conversations in this issue.
On the cover, Studiopepe grants permission to the designers’ former headquarters, now an exhibition space resembling an apartment, to intimately express a creative practice spanning 20 years. Fellow Milan-based designer Elisa Ossino reflects on how, across 14 iterations of her work, she invited visitors to stay a little while, initiating an emotional connection to the spaces.
This search for visceral impact leads us to Venice, among the first to see the inaugural exhibition at Fondazione Dries Van Noten in Palazzo Pisani Moretta, The Only True Protest is Beauty. Challenging preconceptions of beauty through craft and what this can do in such a ‘loaded location’, he proved that beauty is anything but passive.
We leave Italy to visit John Pawson at his Notting Hill home for our latest podcast, where Karen McCartney sits down with the architectural designer to understand how he’s mastered reduction in every direction of his career.
It’s on this note that I leave you with my last letter in the editor’s chair. The finale of 26 issues I’ve loved leading alongside our publisher, Miffy Coady, advisor Karen McCartney, and eternal collaborator, Jack Seedsman, and the talented individuals who continue to bring exceptional living to our ever-growing global audience.
As I make my way back to the other side of the world, I look forward to staying in touch and seeing what’s next for this very special magazine.
– Sophie Lewis, editor
Fondazione Dries Van Noten in Palazzo Pisani Moretta, Venice | Photography by Matteo de Mayda
Dries Van Noten in front of Palazzo Pisani Moretta | Photography by Matteo de Mayda