The Best Design Show Worth Traveling For: My Thoughts on Milan Design Week

There’s nothing quite like landing in Milan during Design Week. The air feels different—electric, charged, almost theatrical. Milan is always one of my favourite cities, but during Design Week it turns itself on its head. Even if it’s your tenth time, your heart still beats a little faster when you walk up the stairs at Centrale. And if it’s your first? Buckle up. Salone del Mobile is the industry’s pilgrimage, and it sweeps you up whether you’re ready or not.

Milan during Design Week is its own universe—fast, social, overflowing with ideas, and so beautiful it’s almost disorienting. You walk for hours without realising it. You see five thousand chairs and somehow want to see five thousand more. You run into people you haven’t seen in years and meet people you should’ve met years ago. It’s energizing, overstimulating, inspiring, and deeply addictive.

The first thing you learn is that Salone has a rhythm. It’s not a sprint. It’s long days, early mornings, late dinners, and a sensory overload that has you falling asleep with your shoes practically still on. Rho reinforces this immediately: the scale is staggering. Every designer I know has underestimated it at least once. You start the day thinking you’ll “just pop into Hall 7,” and suddenly you’ve logged 14,000 steps and you’re still only a fraction of the way through.

Rho is where the brands flex. Heritage houses reveal what they’ve been quietly perfecting for months; suppliers debut new finishes with the kind of confidence only Italians can pull off. If you want real conversations—actual product details, thoughtful introductions—you book appointments. You slow down. Because the magic isn’t in racing through booth after booth. It’s in pausing long enough to notice how a hinge is engineered, how a joint comes together, how a mechanism opens, how a silhouette shifts as you move around it. That’s where the learning is.

But Rho during Design Week isn’t for everyone. In my opinion, it’s best suited to students or suppliers. As a designer, my heart belongs to Fuorisalone (named for being “outside” the salone).

This is the Milan I love most—the city turned inside out. Installations in courtyards, palazzos transformed into dreamlike sets, tiny streets becoming runways of ideas. Each neighbourhood takes on its own personality. Brera is the romantic one—walkable, atmospheric, impossibly charming even when the crowds are shoulder-to-shoulder. Tortona is industrial and conceptual. Then you have 5Vie, Isola, the area around the Triennale. It’s a lot.

Porta Venezia might be my personal favourite. Something about the scale, the architecture, the way Villa Necchi Campiglio quietly anchors the neighbourhood—it feels like Milan at its best. And then there’s Alcova, the wildcard. No one knows where it will be until the announcement, and that mystery becomes part of the fun. One year it’s a former military building; another year it’s a villa in a small town outside the city. It’s always worth the trip.

You can plan your days by neighbourhood “zones,” or build your itinerary around the brands you want to see. Both work.

At some point—usually mid-afternoon—you hit your saturation limit. This is where quiet corners matter. I have my go-to’s: Marchesi or Sant Ambroeus for a quick spro or if I really need a reset, Bar Luce at Fondazione Prada. It’s a bit of a trek, but sitting there—surrounded by Wes Anderson’s pastel geometry—always feels like a small exhale.

And then Milan shifts again, as it always does, when the sun goes down.

Evenings during Salone feel like an entirely separate festival. Aperitivos become openings, openings become parties, and those parties roll into the kind of nights where you blink and suddenly it’s 4AM. Tortona after dark is charged: DJs, crowds spilling onto the streets, designers passionately debating something they just saw (or the line they just waited in). And of course, there’s Bar Basso—part rite of passage, part chaos. You don’t plan to end up there. You just do. Everyone does.

If you’re thinking about what to pack for the day: keep it simple. A functional bag or purse. A notebook. A portable charger (essential). Comfortable shoes you trust with your life. Water. A blazer or scarf for the day-to-night shift—temperatures swing pretty drastically this time of year.

But here’s the real secret of Salone: don’t let it sweep you away. Move with intention. Choose what you want to learn, what you want to see, what you want to be inspired by. Take photos, of course—but also put your phone down and just be in the experience. Let the light hit the terrazzo in a quiet courtyard. Let yourself be surprised by a brand or installation you didn’t expect. Watch how a designer presents a prototype. Listen to the hum of Milan in April.

At the end of each day, jot down a few thoughts. Not to remember everything—but because the pace is fast, and your inspiration will blur if you don’t anchor it.

And above all: don’t try to see everything. No one does. The goal isn’t completeness—it’s connection. It’s inspiration. It’s that one detail you’ll remember six months later when you’re designing a kitchen or selecting a veneer. It’s the feeling you carry home.

There’s so much to share about these few days in Milan. If you’re curious where to eat or stay, I’ll write more. Just ping me on Instagram and let me know.

Until next year,

Lara