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Local talents take Milan
Characterised by its potent mix of heritage style and boundary-pushing innovation, this year’s Salone del Mobile shed light on fresh and established faces, including a hefty contingent of Australian talent.
From modest roots and idealist ambitions, independent design platform Alcova has become a Salone del Mobile phenomenon. Having been staged in former industrial sites on the city fringe, such as an abattoir or the panettone factory from which it takes its name, Alcova chose to go domestic and leave Milan completely this year. Heading to Varedo in the Brianza region, the true heart of the Italian furniture industry, Alcova brought to life two villas to host more than 70 contemporary designers in a domestic context.
The two sites – Villa Borsani, a 1940s modernist masterpiece by architect and furniture designer Osvaldo Borsani, and Villa Bagatti Valsecchi, a sprawling uninhabited 19th-century summer palace built for a noble Milanese family – were star attractions in themselves. At Borsani, people queued along the block outside its high boundary wall to get to the first checkpoint. They then queued again to step inside the entrance hall, with its pink Candoglia marble staircase lined in Murano glass. By contrast, Villa Bagatti Valsecchi unfolded after walking through the front gate; the palazzo appeared as a sort of unreal vision sitting in its own huge park, its derelict Baroque glamour more film set than design expo.
In choosing the two villas, Alcova sought to transcend its role as “a mere setting”. This was the thrill and the challenge for Tom Fereday and Don Cameron. The two Australians came to Alcova and Milan on their own account to pit themselves against their global peers on the most important stage for international design. Other Australians – including Milan stalwart, architect and designer Craig Bassam, emerging talent Olivia Bossy and Salone first-timer David Flack – were attracted for the same reason. “It’s still the largest design week in the world, and you are able to reflect on yourself as a designer among every other designer in the world,” says Fereday.
An established industrial designer with a studio in Sydney’s Camperdown and an international practice, Fereday has exhibited in Milan before, though not in his own right. Instead of showing products designed for specific brands, he wanted to present the purest side of his practice under his own name. “I am beginning to do edition works that don’t have the same commercial constraints as a way to express myself, so I have more freedom,” he says. “I can make one piece or a hundred, which gives me the confidence to make pieces that I hold value to.” He has made versions of his Mazer collection of tables and chairs in Australia using imported stone, but this suite was made three hours away, from locally sourced Roman travertine. “They are very functional, but they are rich in material. The whole core is a celebration of material. I want to create objects that could be generational.”
At Alcova, Fereday opted for Villa Borsani, specifically a patio with a vine-covered trellis near the front door. The brutalist forms of his Mazer range sat handsomely in the dappled light, strong enough to hold their own and, through their red- and grey-toned materiality, be in tune with their surroundings. Even before the first queues formed, he knew that coming was worthwhile from a personal perspective. “When we were setting up and there was no one around, it was the most beautiful experience to install.”
Dubbo-born Cameron came to Milan, and furniture design generally, by a more circuitous route. After studying photography in a design degree at Central Saint Martins in London in the late 1990s, he amassed a deep knowledge and collection of vintage design, at the same time as pursuing a career making music videos and commercials. Eventually it all coalesced. Back in Sydney, he started designing interior spaces, as his fascination with photographing brutal avant-garde architecture evolved into furniture and lights that translated the atmosphere of those images. He launched his eight-piece ‘Translations’ collection with Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert in 2022, attracting considerable local interest.
The next step was to present the wooden stools, desk, coffee table, stainless-steel lamps and sofa outside of an Australian context – in a design show rather than an art gallery. “It’s more a personal exploration of materials and just very personal work,” says Cameron, “things that I have lived with for a long time and ideas that I’ve always been drawn to.”
He chose Alcova’s more theatrical Villa Bagatti Valsecchi, opting for a room visible from the grand front entrance with a 2.7-metre-high rusty oxide door – the perfect backdrop for his highly evolved wooden, steel and ceramic works. Bloc lamps, made in nearby Cantù, with a smooth finish were more refined than those shown in Sydney, while the centrepiece was a spectacular version of his Oblique coffee table; its top made from wire-cut black Spanish clay with hand-patinated glazes from ceramic artist Simon Reece in Blackheath. “I love clay or ceramic because of the lustre – every time I walk past it, I want to touch it,” he says of the piece, which references the undulating roof of an avant-garde maison in Normandy.
The rise of Alcova in popularity and influence since its inception in 2018 is in some ways a barometer for Milan during the week-long design extravaganza.
With its retro French sensibility and 180 kilograms of serious ceramic and solid brass material presence, the table would have stood up to scrutiny on show anywhere in Milan, which is what Cameron hoped for. “I wanted to present the work on a neutral field, in Italy, which is a known forum for presenting design. I wanted to test the response and test the works in that way to an international audience.” He met press and buyers from all over: Brazil, Germany, France, Estonia, Kazakhstan, Bucharest, Budapest, lots of Americans and even a posse from Perth. He describes Alcova as a wonderful experience, where 90,000-odd people trekked over the course of eight days.
The rise of Alcova in popularity and influence since its inception in 2018 is in some ways a barometer for Milan during the week-long design extravaganza. Out at the Rho fairground, the commercial fair attracted a record 370,000 visitors, some 110,000 more than two years ago, 54 per cent of whom were from abroad. But at times, Milan felt like a city under siege from design tourists. Successfully navigating Salone, or the attendant city-wide Fuorisalone events, required an appreciation of the real over the virtual, between objects and surroundings, between ideas and commerce.
Alcova described its seventh edition as “re-creating an almost surreal microcosm: an historically relevant context in which to gather to imagine the future of design”. But its success threatens to overwhelm its ambition, to bring back the risk-taking and experimentation that Alcova founders Valentina Ciuffi and Joseph Grima believe has been displaced by commercial interests in most of Fuorisalone. City-wide, there was a dearth of inventive conceptual installations and an over-abundance of luxury brands.
Nevertheless, led by design and research studio Formafantasma, Prada hosted some of the more cerebral design talks, while Hermès was responsible for the highest quota of raw materials and craft per square metre. The French luxury house shipped tonnes of brick, stone, slate, wood and compacted earth into La Pelota in Brera, from which artisans laid exquisite paths. The idea was for people to feel grounded while contemplating the newest pieces in its luxury home collection, beautifully juxtaposed against humble archival pieces like a walking cane with a built-in measuring stick. Milan-based design studio Dimorestudio retained its status as a true icon, needing police to control the crowd seeking access up the snaking staircase to its gallery and launching a new furniture collection, Interni Venosta. The furniture references Donald Judd, Carle Andre and Walter de Maria, among other 20th-century greats, but still seems original and fresh.
Future stars, including Sydney-based artist and designer Olivia Bossy, were celebrated in the ‘Class of ‘24’ exhibition staged by Wallpaper magazine at the Triennale di Milano design and art museum. Participating from afar, Bossy says she was honoured to show in such an august space with other talents. “It was nice to be around pieces that seemed thoughtful, both in terms of the way they were fabricated and what they were trying to say.” Her piece, A Table for Some Things (but not Others) – riffing on the idea of someone having too many things or thoughts – showed a clear vision expressed in stainless steel and found timber. Bossy sold it to a private client in Europe, happily avoiding shipping it home, freight costs being a prosaic reality of her practice. Having lived between Europe and Australia, she says that sometimes she feels so removed, “which can be great but also hard when you know it would likely be easier in Europe”.
Designer David Flack has built a considerable international following from his Fitzroy base. He believes a virtue of being in Australia, from an architectural interiors point of view, is that you can draw from the landscape and the environment and how they relate to space but also feel free to sample, unburdened by a weighty heritage. “I think that level of isolation and the curiosity of Australians means that we are kind of informed by everyone,” he says.
The Me and You collection of decorative light fittings, developed with Volker Haug Studio, is the first time Flack Studio has done product design, per se. “We have designed products specific to a project, for example for Ace Hotel, but we are not industrial designers, so that’s been the most exciting thing for our studio,” explains Flack.
His collaborator, Volker Haug, deems the collection of lights with names like Stud and Tux to be the result of “very good matchmaking”, with Flack thinking about how the lights would feel in a space and be used and Haug focused on the object, technology, materials and how they might be specified. “That’s what spawned the title Me and You, me as a designer of an interior and you, and that play of light in the spaces,” said Flack as they launched their collection together in the Cinque Vie district.
Visitors to the heritage space, which Flack had lined with a heavy, grey-coloured velvet, asked if their Fleur chandelier was a fixture. This was perhaps the biggest compliment for the fibreglass and aged-brass hero piece, which, like the rest of the collection, was conceived, developed and made in Melbourne. “This collection feels very international to me. There’s a lovely appreciation of scales for all spaces,” says Flack, declaring his relish for launching in the glare of Milan. “People flock here. You know they are coming to see something that’s highly elevated, anticipated, so to launch here gives it a different perspective … I don’t think it’s daunting. I think it’s really exciting.”
Craig Bassam grew up in Sydney, where he studied architecture, but has lived and worked in the United States for decades. When he set up BassamFellows in 2003, with his partner Scott Fellows, he reflected on his identity and that of their new furniture company. “I didn’t want to launch it at a show in America because I didn’t feel American. I’m not, I just happen to live and work there.” To launch BassamFellows – at that stage, more of an idea than a reality – they they took over a temporary space in a former blacksmith shop in Brera and have been there ever since, becoming more and more embedded in the Italian way. “We have moved all of our production to Italy because I love working with Italian factories – we can do so many different things. We were joking we feel a bit like an Italian company, but we’re based in the States.”
As for his identity, Bassam says his sensibility is Australian. “There is a rawness [about my work]. Not raw as such because what I do is still refined, but there’s an honesty. I am about honest materials, not about embellishment; things in solid wood that I want you to use, to bang it up.” What could be more Australian?
