Material experiments in Milan

Milan’s design week is about to turn a chair into a materials argument and a grocery run into a stone-age dream. From April 20 to 26, 2026, the city’s Fuorisalone program overlaps with Salone del Mobile, which runs April 21 to 26 at Fiera Milano Rho. (archiproducts.com) (salonemilano.it) One project starts with a simple design problem: most chairs stay stable by being heavy or by hiding a rigid frame inside. Veronica Olariu’s Hemp Chair tries the opposite move, using counterbalance and tension so the structure holds itself together with less mass. (designboom.com) Olariu built the seat shells from layered hemp fabric wrapped around a core of pineapple-leaf felt, turning agricultural fibers into a bio-composite. The result is a chair with two use positions, upright and reclined, guided by curved shells that help align the body. (designboom.com) The production method matters here because Olariu says the shells are made with resin transfer molding, a closed-mold process that pushes resin through dry fibers for more even saturation and less waste. That makes the experiment less like a one-off sculpture and more like a test of how plant fibers could behave in repeatable manufacturing. (briefly.co) (designboom.com) Olariu places the chair in the lineage of an earlier Counterpoise Chair, but swaps the material logic from conventional structure to renewable fibers and what she calls a different “material ethics.” On her project page, she describes the loom as a quiet reference, which helps explain why the chair looks less like furniture with legs and more like tensioned textile held in shape. (veronicaolariu.com) (thehempchair.com) A few districts away, SolidNature is working on the opposite end of the material spectrum. Its new installation with AMO, the research and design studio of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, is called Il Sonno and turns ordinary domestic goods into stone objects inside a dreamlike supermarket. (designboom.com) (solidnature.com) The point is not that stone is new, but that SolidNature and AMO are treating it as a way to slow down the logic of throwaway consumption. Designboom’s interview with SolidNature founder David Mahyari says the installation replaces common household items with stone artifacts so a quick shopping trip starts to feel like a walk through geological time. (designboom.com) That idea builds on a relationship SolidNature already had with the Office for Metropolitan Architecture. OMA designed SolidNature’s 2023 Milan installation Beyond the Surface to show how natural stone moves from geological formation to finished product, and this year’s collaboration pushes that story from extraction and craft into everyday life. (oma.com) (solidnature.com) Put those two projects together and Milan starts to look less obsessed with styling surfaces and more obsessed with what things are made of. One designer is asking whether a chair can be lighter by behaving more like stretched fabric, while one stone company is asking whether a supermarket can feel permanent by behaving more like a quarry. (designboom.com 1) (designboom.com 2) That is a sharp shift from the old trade-fair formula where the object was the whole story. In Milan this month, the object is almost a prop, and the real pitch is a material timeline that runs from pineapple leaves and hemp fields all the way to stone that is meant to outlast the room it sits in. (designboom.com 1) (designboom.com 2)