The 12 Best Things We Saw at Salone Del Mobile

This year’s Salone del Mobile furniture fair, which took place this week in Milan, fell much earlier in April than usual. But that didn’t spare visitors from the sneezing fits the city’s springtime pollen shed can bring — or from the long lines and late nights that are now part of the event, which in recent years has become even bigger than the city’s fashion week. There was plenty of chatter about how shifting tariffs might affect the industry but, in all other ways, the fair was business as usual, with big design brands launching new projects and fashion houses getting in on the action with homewares collections or — in some cases this year — surprising, experimental collaborations. Below, a dozen projects that stood out.

Group design exhibitions that feature a single type of object — for example, mugs or stools — have become a mainstay over the past few years. For its latest design-world homage to craftsmanship, the Spanish fashion house Loewe, which presented an array of lamps at last year’s fair, commissioned 25 artists and designers from around the world to produce their take on a teapot. The resulting pieces resemble miniature sculptures, and among the highlights were the American artist Dan McCarthy’s lumpy ceramic vessels adorned with his signature childlike faces; a purple airbrushed version by the Spanish architect and designer Patricia Urquiola; and a frosting-like swirl of white clay by the Japanese ceramist Takayuki Sakiyama.

The family-run Italian brand Bolzan has been manufacturing high-end beds since the early 1990s, but this year it hired the Treviso-based design duo Zanellato/Bortotto to curate a collection of headboards as expressive as they are functional. The pair invited four designers to contribute works that included floating blue fabric draped across a hidden wood frame, conceived by Julie Richoz, and a piece by India Mahdavi featuring a customizable bar of large, colorful ceramic beads.