Milan Design Week 2026: The most beautiful installations seen in Milan
Every year, Milan Design Week turns the city into a kind of live laboratory where design, art and architecture overlap through large-scale, temporary installations. The 64th edition confirms its role as a key moment for reading emerging directions in the field. Through unexpected scenography, the installations blur the line between design and contemporary art, creating an immersive circuit across the city that runs until April 26.
In the heart of Milan’s business district, Dimoregallery takes over a former bank to present a new 700-square-metre space dedicated to curated vintage and contemporary design. The layout preserves the building’s original structure, including the underground vaults, now reinterpreted as display rooms for furniture pieces with archival value.
Via San Vittore al Teatro 3, 20123 Milano, Italy
This year’s installation is set inside the historic Guido Romano swimming pool in Milan’s Città Studi district. The former pool becomes an immersive exhibition space where the architecture is exposed and reactivated through contemporary interventions. Across the site, a dialogue emerges between glass elements and the building’s original structure, using transparency and reflection to reveal the spatial qualities of the space rather than conceal them.
Piscina Guido Romano, Via Ampère 24, 20131 Milano, Italy
Gucci Memoria is an exhibition designed by Demna at the Chiostri di San Simpliciano. The project traverses 105 years of history, exploring the evolution of the house's identity, from its Florentine origins to global fame. Twelve tapestries, conceived as a visual chronicle of the house, translate the founding moments of Gucci's history.
Chiostri di San Simpliciano, Piazza Paolo VI 6, 20121 Milano, Italy
The Villa Pestarini, designed by Franco Albini, opens its doors for the first time during Alcova, hosting a selection of international designers who activate the interiors through site-specific interventions. Built in 1938, this is Albini’s only residential project, designed when he was 33. The villa is defined by a controlled formal clarity and a precise spatial rhythm, structured through carefully positioned openings that connect interior spaces to the garden and the street. Material choices emphasise durability and restraint, reinforcing the building’s focus on longevity and architectural clarity.
Villa Pestarini, Via Mogadiscio 2, 20144 Milano, Italy
To mark the fifteenth anniversary of Belgian design studio Muller Van Severen, the exhibition Silhouettes, presented by Apartamento in collaboration with Tim Van Laere Gallery, reinterprets the duo’s signature formal language through abstraction. Fifteen life-size chandeliers are installed within Ordet gallery, transforming the space into a sequence of suspended outlines that echo the designers’ sculptural approach to everyday objects.
Ordet, Via Filippino Lippi 4, 20121 Milano, Italy
This year, Baccarat unveils a theatrical installation somewhere between performance and DJ set, blurring the boundaries between presentation and performance. For Crystal Crypt, artist Emmanuelle Luciani imagines a choreography and scenography, following the gesture and work of the glassblowers, in a staging at the crossroads of science fiction and neo-gothic space opera. Baccarat reinvents its Harcourt crystal glasses and teams up with designer Bethan Laura Wood to create futuristic chandeliers.
Via Marco Formentini 10, 20121 Milano, Italy
Luis Urculo’s site-specific installation unfolds inside a private apartment in Milan’s San Vittore district. Conceived as a suspended, timeless sequence, it presents carpets, textiles and ceramics from the Códices collection, drawing on references to Mexican geometric architecture, including pyramidal forms, carved reliefs and pre-Hispanic codices. The installation builds a layered composition where material and pattern reflect craft traditions and cultural memory within a domestic setting.
Via Paolo Giovio 9, 20144 Milano, Italy
Designed by architect Hannes Peer, the Terrain exhibition explores the architectural potential of ceramics and how the material has evolved from historical applications to contemporary design practice. The installation takes the form of a constructed landscape, where a large wall composition unfolds like a continuous surface. Within it, fractures, textures and layered finishes are revealed, creating a reading of ceramics as both structural and expressive material.
Via G.B. Niccolini 35A, 20154 Milano, Italy
At the Crespi Bonsai Museum, Kengo Kuma presents a collection of 16 new rugs for Jaipur Rugs. The series draws inspiration from architectural facades, reinterpreting them through layered compositions of graphic motifs and natural tones. Some designs reference elements of Tokyo’s built environment, translated into textile form through a controlled play of overlap, pattern and material depth within the museum setting.
SS33 del Sempione 37, 20015 San Lorenzo di Parabiago, Italy
An immersive installation by Margraf and architect Hannes Peer, La Casa di Marmo is set beneath the garden of a historic villa. The project constructs an underground sequence organised around a central patio, where water features, shifting reflections and marble walls sourced from a Tuscan quarry define the space. The installation treats marble as both structure and surface, using light and water to alter perception and create a controlled, atmospheric environment that unfolds as a continuous spatial experience.
1 Spazio Cernaia, Via Cernaia 1, 20121 Milano, Italy
Another sight to see at Milan Design Week 2026, is Milanese architect Massimiliano Locatelli's mosaic inside the SiMa Townhouse cocktail bar, unveiling a masterly fresco covered with ceramic mosaic murals. Sensitive to the skills of Vietnamese craftsmen, Locatelli works with ceramic fragments cut into various shapes and sizes, assembling them into a three-dimensional canvas.
Corso du Porta Vigentina 12
Behind moiré textiles, alabaster surfaces and heavy curtains, the immersive Camera Fissa installation by De Troupe in collaboration with Studioutte evokes a retro-futurist private club atmosphere, defined by a muted, theatrical stillness. Conceived as a cinematic set composed of fixed frames, the space presents new lighting pieces in alabaster and blackened steel that explore the relationship between light, material and form. The monochrome palette reinforces a sense of suspended time, where objects and surfaces appear staged within a continuous black-and-white composition.
Via Volturno 45, 20124 Milano, Italy
Surrounded by beechwood blocks of varying volumes, the exhibition designed by architect Charlotte Macaux Perelman evokes a constructed cityscape, where the Hermès in-house collection acts as a structural foundation rather than a display. The scenography treats furniture as urban elements, arranged to suggest circulation, density and rhythm across space.
La Pelota, via Palermo 10
Developed in collaboration with designer Michael Bargo, Yves Salomon Editions unveils a new collection of pieces at the crossroads of American heritage and Parisian savoir-faire. Vintage pieces revisited by American designers rub shoulders with a series of quilts by Michael Bargo, weaving together the story of a trip to Milan.
Via Pietro Mascagni 22, 20122 Milano, Italy
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