Jasmine Serrurier reports from the Milan Furniture Fair.

Thursday, April 17

Bottega Veneta

True to the house's formula, "When Your Own Initials Are Enough," Tomas Maier's home collection for Bottega Veneta is anti-logo and doesn't follow color-by-numbers head-to-toe-to-home mantra that so many designers adhere to. The uniting thread, no surprise, was Bottega's famous woven vacchetta leather. Style.com found it hand-painted on porcelain (by KPM), etched into Murano glass and sterling-silver desk sets, and even enveloping the base of a lamp.

Fondazione Prada Expands

Fondazione Prada announced its most ambitious project to date, a new 18 000-square-meter space set in an industrial complex on the outskirts of Milan that will take at least three years to complete. The area is set to be transformed into a site for multimedia events,
installations for exhibitions, and to provide a series of secure vaults to house Miuccia Prada and Patrizio Bertelli's overflowing art collections and archives. Rem Koolhaas was on-site to lay out the blueprint. "Domestic scale is absent in contemporary art," he said. "My challenge here is not just about a space for objects. I need to create a dialogue between the environment and the pieces within it."

Moschino

Moschino released two scoops for the Salone, one cheeky and ironic, and the other surreal. The first were the sexy ghost chairs, two of Philippe Starck/Kartell's popular Perspex chairs dressed in transparent froufrou tulle slipcovers. Second up was the Sant'Andrea store's window display, which had borrowed from the surreal, as its objects had been sliced in two, leaving the missing halves as mirror reflections. This was meant to not only fire off a whole load of existential questions—i.e., "Does it not exist simply because we can't see it?"—but to also give a taste of what is in store for the 69-room hotel Moschino's set to open next year.

Friday, April 18

Trussardi and Patrick Blanc's vertical garden

It was easy finding Patrick Blanc, who created a vertical garden for Trussardi's café near La Scala: His hair was a fluorescent green beacon in a sea of mostly black raincoats. "I am a botanist and my work in jungles and studying growth patterns of low-lying plant life helped me understand to what limits we can put the plants," he told us. "Once the "structure is set up, all that is left to do is for someone to pass by and give my growing wall a haircut."

Molteni & Vivienne Westwood partnership

Big Milanese furniture companies aren't generally known for taking risks, so it was a bit of a surprise to hear that Molteni has paired up with renowned envelope-pusher Vivienne Westwood. "I am a great believer of mixing the avant-garde with tradition," she said. "I have always been inspired by historical costume—my clothes are tradition brought to the future. Now I am mixing it up with furniture." Don't look for a Westwood homeware revolution just yet, though—Molteni's taking baby steps with this new project. For her first collection for the company, Westwood used her Pirates-era "squiggle" fabric to cover one of its classic models.