Across Salone and beyond, Milan Design Week 2025 set a high bar in design while offering serious cues about where to focus in the months ahead. Beneath the surface spectacle, a clear shift is emerging in how designers are rethinking materiality, modularity, and emotional resonance. If you didn’t make it to Milan, Interior Design 411 lays out the top takeaways from one of the year’s biggest design events.
Function Meets Fun With Kinetic Design
This year, the most talked-about pieces were designed to engage the user. Marrimor’s Drape sofa invited pause to linger and enjoy tactile interaction with its rippling, watery edges. Mooomo’s Lego-inspired stools introduced an elevated modular spontaneity, letting users swap tactile, upholstered components on a whim.
Franck Genser’s bongo-table hybrid playfully blurred boundaries between function and expression, encouraging designers to consider objects as conversation starters. Toni Grilo’s Volte Face mirror for Riluc pushed this further, integrating a kinetic element that physically alters the reflected space by turning a static wall piece into a dynamic visual experience.
For interior designers, kinetic furniture opens up new storytelling possibilities. Objects now serve multiple roles, bridging utility, adaptability, and narrative. They can punctuate a hospitality lounge with a memorable moment, serve as adaptable anchors in residential zones, or reinforce branding in commercial environments through their performative quality. In boutique hotel lobbies, for example, designers might use kinetic mirrors like Grilo’s Volte Face to heighten guest interaction and create Instagrammable moments that double as wayfinding cues. Kinetic design encourages users to participate in a space rather than simply occupy it.
Biophilia Has Matured
The buzz around biophilia has finally moved past surface greenery or moss walls. This year, brands integrated natural materials in more sophisticated ways. Sten Studio’s “Cosmic Resonance” pieces — crafted from pink onyx, lava stone, and travertine — anchored organic form into statement furniture.
Similarly, Lodes’ Outdoor Reed and Kinno lighting lines took cues from nature without veering into kitsch. Inspired by botanical and fungal forms, these fixtures offer biophilic symbolism without feeling cliché. Their refined finishes and architectural quality are ideal for designers looking to bring subtle organic references into retail, hospitality, or high-end residential settings.
Great Library Design Studio’s Volita chair exemplifies this shift. Its sculptural nod to insect wings blends Art Nouveau elegance with contemporary craftsmanship, offering designers a perfect example for how biophilia can be culturally resonant and materially rich.
These pieces provide ways to soften hard-edged interiors, add emotional warmth, and support wellness-driven design goals. Most importantly, they offer a path to connect clients with nature in ways that feel integrated, not imposed.
Legacy Brands Are Breaking the Rules
Milan showed us that legacy doesn’t mean complacency. Established names like Poltrona Frau, Treca, and Dedar used the platform to disrupt their own traditions. Poltrona Frau’s limited-edition Dezza chair, based on Gio Ponti’s archival design, featured surrealist leather prints, an unexpected departure that added visual tension to a classic form. Treca’s Versailles bed, wrapped in Chanel’s Lesage tweed, fused fashion pedigree with bedroom design in a way that felt tailored, not gimmicky.
For designers, this signals a meaningful shift. Storied brands are now open to reinterpretation, offering pieces that retain quality and heritage but speak with a louder, more personal voice. That’s useful when clients want cachet without conformity. These collaborations and design risks create an opportunity to inject boldness into a project without sacrificing trust in craftsmanship or longevity.
Rather than defaulting to tried-and-true SKUs, designers can now turn to these heritage houses for pieces that carry built-in narrative and cultural resonance. In a landscape saturated with “safe” luxury, distinctiveness is the new currency.
The New Textiles Carry More Weight
At Milan Design Week 2025, textiles were central to the narrative of material innovation. Kvadrat’s Diade fabric, made from ocean-bound plastic, was one of the more quietly radical debuts in sustainable luxury. Available in 16 saturated colorways, it offered both visual richness and environmental credibility, making it ideal for designers specifying for LEED projects, wellness-driven interiors, or clients demanding traceable sourcing.
Meanwhile, Dedar’s collaboration with the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation brought an entirely different kind of depth. By reissuing Albers’s iconic textile patterns using contemporary weaving techniques, they revived historic design through a modern lens. These fabrics operate as both art and surface, introducing abstract geometry and cultural gravitas into upholstery, drapery, or wall treatments.
Interior designers should be paying attention. These materials elevate aesthetic storytelling and meet increasingly complex client demands around sustainability and ethics. Textiles are now part of the conceptual spine of a project. Whether you’re aiming to express identity, align with sustainability goals, or bridge eras in a transitional scheme, the latest textile innovations give you new tools to work smarter and more meaningfully.
Gallery Installations as Design Labs
Spaces like Artemest’s L’Appartamento and Pierre-Yves Rochon’s “Villa Héritage” functioned as high-concept showrooms with full emotional immersion. Designers can extract more than inspiration here; they offer case studies in mood-setting, material layering, and period blending.
The utility lies in how these setups model full-spectrum design thinking, from curatorial intent to sensory engagement. They provide real-world blueprints for how to guide clients through a space that doesn’t just look good in photos, but feels intuitive, expressive, and memorable in person.
The shift is subtle but significant: These installations blur the line between commercial showcase and artistic provocation, offering a testbed for pushing boundaries in any project. For designers willing to look closely, they’re design labs hiding in plain sight.
Why This Matters for Your Projects
The most successful exhibitors at Milan Design Week 2025 were those embracing the complexity of modern living with adaptable design, heritage with a twist, and materials with a message. You can leverage these insights into your own design practice. Push clients toward interactive pieces that make them feel involved in their space. Use materials that say something. And don’t be afraid to blend traditional craftsmanship with daring aesthetics.
Design today is about meaningful aesthetics. Milan reminded everyone why that matters.
SOURCES: Business of Home, Design Milk, Salone del Mobile, Stir Pad, AD Middle East
