Herzog & de Meuron’s MTM furniture
Herzog & de Meuron and UniFor launched ‘MTM – Made to Measure’ at Milan, a furniture collection that mixes customization with playful pieces — including cork-upholstered items and even a ping‑pong table designed as social furniture. The collection leans into bespoke scaling and materials choice, which makes it relevant if you’re thinking about flexible entertaining spaces or material-forward interiors. It’s an example of high design treating play and customization as central features rather than afterthoughts. (wallpaper.com)
Herzog & de Meuron do not usually enter a room through the furniture aisle. They arrive through the building. The Swiss firm is best known for projects like Tate Modern and the Elbphilharmonie, and its own website makes the point plainly: the studio treats buildings as complete worlds, down to chairs, lights, hooks, and textiles (herzogdemeuron.com). That helps explain why its new collaboration with the Italian furniture company UniFor does not look like a side project. “MTM – Made to Measure,” announced for Milan Design Week 2026, is a full furniture system, not a one-off designer stunt (unifor.it). The name matters because the idea is not novelty for novelty’s sake. UniFor describes MTM as an “open constructive principle” built on a fixed geometry that can scale, extend, and reconfigure without losing its identity. The family includes tables, benches, sofas, coffee tables, and a table-tennis version, all based on the same structural logic (unifor.it). That sounds abstract until you see where it came from. According to Wallpaper, the system began in 2022 as a standing-table prototype for Herzog & de Meuron’s Basel studio, then fed into modular benches for the firm’s Memphis Art Museum project in late 2024 (wallpaper.com). That origin story is the real point. MTM grew out of architecture, then came back as furniture. The pieces share what Wallpaper calls a matrix of solid angled frames, with wood elements joined in three dimensions through a version of the traditional castle joint. The result is meant to look lighter than it is, with thin proportions sitting on a rigid skeleton (wallpaper.com). UniFor has long worked in that territory between office system and architectural component, and Herzog & de Meuron has already designed the company’s Milan showroom around scale, repetition, transparency, and reconfiguration (herzogdemeuron.com). MTM reads like that same thinking shrunk to the size of a room. But the collection would be less interesting if it were only a lesson in structural rigor. What gives it charge is the way it mixes discipline with play. Wallpaper reports that the line includes cork-upholstered pieces and a ping-pong table. Surface adds that the system pairs tectonic metal frames with upholstered elements in cork leather, a renewable material chosen for durability as well as feel (surfacemag.com; wallpaper.com). That is a sharp move. Cork softens the severity of the frame, and table tennis turns a formal object into social equipment. Milan is the right place to test that proposition because Salone del Mobile is where furniture still gets treated as a way of thinking, not just a product drop. The 2026 fair runs from April 21 to April 26, and UniFor is showing MTM at its Spazio UniFor on Viale Pasubio as part of an installation called “Non Places,” developed with Studio Klass (salonemilano.it; unifor.it; dezeen.com). UniFor says the installation stages the collection as a controlled spatial sequence of structure, light, and movement, which is exactly how architects talk when they are designing a building (unifor.it). In this case, one of those architectural sequences ends at a ping-pong table.
