Stone dream: Il Sonno

A hotel garden in Milan is about to become a stone supermarket where the groceries do not rot, the shampoo bottles do not crumple, and the shopping trip is staged like a dream. The installation is called “Il Sonno,” and it opens during Milan Design Week 2026 inside designboom’s “Room for Dreams” program at ME Milan Il Duca. (designboom.com) The setup comes from SolidNature, a stone company, working with AMO, the research and strategy arm of Office for Metropolitan Architecture, the architecture studio founded by Rem Koolhaas. Designboom says Samir Bantal of AMO is the creative lead on the project, with SolidNature owner David Mahyari helping turn the concept into built form. (designboom.com) The trick is simple and strange: take the fastest, most disposable corner of daily life, the supermarket aisle, and remake it in one of the slowest materials on earth. Designboom says ordinary household goods are replaced with carved stone artifacts so shopping starts to feel less like grabbing supplies and more like walking through geological time. (designboom.com) That reversal is the whole point. In designboom’s description, the installation freezes a place normally built for speed and reflex, then turns commodities into objects you stop and look at, shifting the mood from consumption to awareness. (designboom.com) SolidNature says the project uses more than 40 varieties of stone, which gives the fake supermarket the weight and visual richness of a monument instead of a store display. Mahyari told designboom that the products “are staying forever,” while the visitors are the temporary ones passing through. (designboom.com) The collaboration also has history behind it. Designboom says SolidNature has worked with the people around Office for Metropolitan Architecture and AMO for about 15 years, and “Il Sonno” is presented as a new chapter in that longer relationship rather than a one-off fair-week stunt. (designboom.com) The location matters because Milan Design Week is not one exhibition hall but a citywide takeover. The City of Milan says the 2026 edition runs from April 20 to April 26, spans 19 neighborhoods, and includes more than 267 initiatives in the official public program, with over 1,850 events across the city. (comune.milano.it) “Il Sonno” sits inside one of those temporary worlds. Designboom’s “Room for Dreams” takes over the Aldo Rossi-designed ME Milan Il Duca hotel from April 21 to April 26, 2026, using the garden, lobby, and basement meeting spaces for installations, talks, and screenings built around dreaming as a design tool. (designboom.com) So the story here is not just that someone carved stone into familiar objects. It is that SolidNature and AMO picked the most forgettable objects in a home, put them in the most durable material they could find, and used Milan’s biggest design week to ask why modern domestic life is built around things meant to disappear. (designboom.com)