At Milan Design Week, New Twists on Unexpected Materials

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This article is part of our Design special report previewing Milan Design Week.

Where else but at Milan Design Week would you find bookcases made from books, a bar cabinet covered in hairy hide and a pavilion (and all its contents) fashioned from the stuff that stoppers wine bottles? The resourcefulness of designers working with unexpected materials is once again on full display, sometimes to make a point about sustainability (like Casa Cork, a project led by Rockwell Group), and sometimes just to look great.

“I was saved by literature,” said Aline Asmar d’Amman of her exhibition at Galleria Rossana Orlandi called “The Power of Tenderness.” “These books that I imbed into concrete are the bricks and mortar of my inner foundation.”

Ms. d’Amman is a Lebanese-born architect and interior designer. Her firm, Culture in Architecture, with offices in Beirut and Paris, has refurbished suites at the Hôtel de Crillon with the fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld. It is currently renovating the Orient Express Hotel Palazzo Donà Giovannelli in Venice, as well as the Dream of the Desert train, being developed with Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Culture.

Ms. d’Amman has often spoken of her childhood in a war-torn country where she soothed herself by reading. She still thinks of books as her companions, she said: “Their physical presence is a necessary oxygen.”

The new pieces are created entirely by hand. Ms. d’Amman works side by side with artisans at the Laboratorio Morseletto in Vicenza, Italy, and uses simple ingredients: books that she has collected over the years, concrete, and scraps of marble and other stones. She has described the resulting pieces — shelves, pedestals, tables and bookends — as “contemporary archaeological compositions,” but some may see in them survivors of war.

“Being Lebanese and going through years of war,” Ms. d’Amman said, “your eye is marked by the ruins, and by the beauty and the nobility of what remains.”

“The Power of Tenderness” opened on April 6 and is on view through the year at Galleria Rossana Orlandi, 14 Via Matteo Bandello; rossanaorlandi.com. — RIMA SUQI

For about a decade, Loewe, the Spanish fashion house, has shown a collection of home décor during Milan’s design week. The presentations began in 2015 with a focus on a specific category — baskets, chairs, lamps and the like — and always with an emphasis on craft.

This year, 25 artists, designers and architects from 10 countries were invited to create a teapot or tea set in ceramic. Among them was Dan McCarthy, an American ceramicist known for his “Facepots.”

Mr. McCarthy had never made a teapot before. “I had to buy special clay and special glazes and fire at temperatures I don’t usually fire at,” he said.

Functionality was not a requirement (only about half the teapots in the group can be used), but he steamed ahead with a workable model: “I wanted to make something that felt loose and accessible and said, ‘I’ve arrived here in my gooey magical way.’”

The artist, who is originally from Hawaii, undertook the challenge from his home in the Catskills in New York. In the end, he made 10 teapots for Loewe to choose from, each about a foot tall. “I wanted to show off a little bit, so I made them kind of big,” he said. (Two were selected.) He gave special attention to the handle, which, in order to remain upright, was fashioned from an oak dowel and wire normally used for mending fences. This way, he said, the teapot is always at the ready.

“Loewe Teapots” is on view Monday through Sunday at Palazzo Citterio, 12 Via Brera. — RIMA SUQI

At a glance, Orior’s new Beatha drinks cabinet evokes sophisticated caveman décor. It is a stocky, solid walnut piece with doors wrapped in Italian cowhide. Those doors open (via hand-formed bronze handles) to reveal an interior that can be customized for the user’s needs. Options include bottle storage, wine racks, drawers and trays; the only fixed piece is the top shelf, which is clad in marble.

In photos, the cabinet “looks really tall and broad, but it is quite small and compact, which is nice because it doesn’t overwhelm a room,” said Ciaran McGuigan, the creative director of Orior, which was founded by his parents in 1979. The piece, which is about 5 feet tall by 4 feet wide, was crafted at Orior’s workshop in Northern Ireland, with the exception of the handles and hinges, which were made at a foundry in County Cork.

About the cabinet’s name: It is a shortened version of “uisce beatha,” which is Gaelic for both “water of life” and “whiskey.” Mr. McGuigan is good-humored about the derivation. “There’s no rhyme or reason to some of the pieces we launch. Being Irish we should 100 percent have made a drinks cabinet before this, but we’re pleased with the outcome.”

Beatha is one of nine pieces Orior is introducing in Milan this year. It is on view from Tuesday through Sunday at Bocci Milan, a residential showroom at 20 Via Giuseppe Rovani; oriorfurniture.com. — RIMA SUQI

Rockwell Group, the design firm known for creating immersive interiors for restaurants, hotels and stage productions, will unveil a space in Milan’s Brera neighborhood that highlights a sustainable and versatile material: cork.

The material is the focus of Cork Collective, a nonprofit initiative that was founded in part by Rockwell Group and works with the hospitality industry to collect and repurpose discarded cork bottle stoppers. Cork, which the firm’s founder David Rockwell said can be infinitely recycled and sequesters carbon, is “one of these major invisible resources that is right under people’s noses.”

The installation in Milan, called Casa Cork, taps members of the design and hospitality communities, as well as students and educators, to showcase innovative ways that cork can be fashioned and reused.

Visitors are invited to move through three spaces in which the material appears as flooring, light fixtures, furniture and other objects: a gallery where people can interact with various types of cork, a workshop that will host designs from a student competition and a salon with a bar for wine tastings.

Throughout the week, speakers will host discussions and demonstrations about cork and its different uses.

The centerpiece of the installation is a replica of a cork tree in Portugal that has been scanned, 3-D printed and laminated with cork from fallen trees, representing the material’s source and potential for a second life. The firm also thought about its own footprint, designing the installation to be packed up and used again elsewhere.

“Although it’s being created for Milan,” Mr. Rockwell said, “it’s a kind of circular economy, too.”

The exhibition is open Tuesday through Saturday, 31 Via Solferino; corkcollective.org. — LAUREN MESSMAN

Last year, Norsk Hydro, the Norwegian aluminum and renewable energy company, collaborated with seven designers to create home décor items made entirely from Hydro’s 100 percent post-consumer aluminum. This project, unveiled at Milan Design Week, explored the design possibilities of the material.

In this second installment of Hydro’s CIRCAL 100R series, the company seeks to minimize the material’s carbon footprint as it is converted into a design object by focusing on “extremely local production,” said Jacob Nielsen, a communications director at Hydro. For the project, titled R100, all parts of the manufacturing and design process had to be done within a 100-kilometer (about 62-mile) radius, including the collection of post-consumer scrap and the assembly of the final prototypes.

Five industrial designers worked with the project’s art director, Lars Beller Fjetland, to create the aluminum objects, exercising total freedom in the size and type of extrusions. One participant, Daniel Rybakken, a Norwegian designer who runs a studio in Sweden, said he saw this as “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that you get the chance to do kind of whatever you want.”

For his project, “Fields,” Mr. Rybakken created a sculpture that has no inherent practical function. He said he originally considered more traditional typologies, like an extruded lamp, but then thought, “Why not do something that no manufacturer would touch in normal cases?”

Resembling an architectural model, his piece mediates between the cold industrial components and a warm, poetic object.

“That was actually the most challenging part of it, because it’s the balance of an abstraction,” Mr. Rybakken said. “Where it’s recognized as something and not being too literal at the same time.”

The R100 objects are on display Tuesday through Sunday at Spazio Maiocchi, 7 Via Achille Maiocchi; hydro.com. — MORGAN MALGET

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