Every April, Milan stops pretending to be a normal city. Luxury houses, designers, and fragrance brands transform churches, factories, and courtyards into installations that have mostly to do with desire. Here are IRMASWORLD’s invites for the first days — which she is already anxious whether she can cover all.
THE VENUES
Gucci Memoria
Gucci occupies one of Milan’s most commanding Romanesque cloisters for an installation that engages the house’s archival history. More measured than spectacular — a dialogue between visual vocabulary and sacred space. From the 21st, daily from 10am.
Chiostri di San Simpliciano · Via Petrarca 4 · 21–26 April
Material Anthology — Tacchini & Faye Toogood
Toogood’s work holds a room rather than merely furnishing it. Her collaboration with Tacchini sits at the precise intersection of sculpture and seating — tactile, elemental, rigorous.
Casa Tacchini · Largo Treves 5 · 20–26 April
Objects That Speak — Rosewood × Wallpaper*
Deyan Sudjic curates a conversation continued with the late Andrea Branzi — Radical Design pioneer, disciplinary provocateur. Design as narration rather than problem-solving. The week’s most considered evening.
Via Carlo de Cristoforis 1 · Tuesday 21 April · 18:00–20:00
Chawan Cabinet — Prada Home & Theaster Gates
Theaster Gates presents editioned ceramic vessels and ceremonial tea bowl forms at Prada Home — objects to be held and handled over time, not merely observed. On the most commercially saturated street in Milan, that proposition carries a particular force.
Prada Home · Via Montenapoleone 6 · 10:00–20:00 Daily
Osteria Fiori di Marimekko
The Navigli district belongs to a different, easier Milan. Marimekko brings its bold print vocabulary to an aperitivo setting at the Osteria Grand Hotel — inhabited rather than curated. Creative Director Rebekka Bay and Design Director Minna Kemell-Kutvonen in attendance. Among a week of studied restraint, genuinely refreshing.
Via Ascanio Sforza 75 · Naviglio Pavese · Monday 20 April · 10:00–15:00
Galleria Rossana Orlandi — RoCollectible 2026
No serious Design Week itinerary omits Orlandi. For thirty years, the gallery has backed designers whose work resists easy categorisation. The interconnected spaces — courtyard, showroom, garden — reward a slow visit. One of the few addresses that does.
Via Matteo Bandello 16 · 20–26 April · 9:30–20:00
Palazzo Litta — MoscaPartners Variations
Among Milan’s grandest baroque interiors. MoscaPartners takes the risk of the setting knowingly — frescoed halls, gilded stucco — and argues for design that earns its context through material intelligence. A natural Magenta district anchor.
Corso Magenta 24 · 21–26 April
Open Studio — Arthur Arbesser
The Milan-based Viennese designer opens his studio for the week. No press officers, no formal programme. Precise, warm, personal. Worth the detour.
Studies, Chapter I: On the Plaid — Loro Piana
An installation devoted to the plaid as a foundational element of the interior world — scholarly, confident, disinclined to spectacle. One day only. Arrive with time to stay.
Via della Moscova 33 · 20 April Only · 10:00–18:00
Politics of Desire — Miu Miu Literary Club
Annie Ernaux and Ama Ata Aidoo — Nobel laureate and Ghanaian literary pioneer — brought together under the theme of desire at one of Milan’s oldest private intellectual societies. Fashion taking literature seriously, in the best possible way. Do not miss it.
Circolo Filologico Milanese · Via Clerici 10 · 22–24 April
If you need a break from it all . . .
WHERE TO BREATHE
Villa Necchi Campiglio
Piero Portaluppi designed this rationalist villa between 1932 and 1935 for a family of Lombard industrialists — and it remains, quietly and completely, one of the most beautiful interiors in Milan. Luca Guadagnino filmed I Am Love here; Tilda Swinton moved through its rooms with the particular ease of someone who understood that the building was itself the performance. The garden is secluded, the swimming pool the first private one in the city. An hour here — away from phones, away from the programme — resets everything.
Via Mozart 14 · Wed–Sun 10:00–18:00 · €15
fondoambiente.it/villa-necchi-campiglio
Museo Poldi Pezzoli
A two-minute walk from the Quadrilatero and as far from it as possible in spirit. Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli collected with the obsessive precision of someone who genuinely could not stop — arms and armour, clocks, textiles, Botticelli, Piero della Francesca. The rooms are small, intimate, and almost always calm during Design Week because most people hurrying along Via Manzoni do not think to look up at the door. Their loss.
Via Manzoni 12 · Tue–Sun 10:00–18:00
Orto Botanico di Brera
Behind the Pinacoteca di Brera, hidden from Via Fiori Chiari and the aperitivo crowd, lies a botanical garden that almost nobody visits during Design Week. Founded by the Jesuits in 1782, it is small, slightly overgrown in the best possible way, and entirely free. Mornings only — the ideal start to a day before the showrooms open and the city tightens.
Via Brera 28 · Mon–Fri 9:00–12:00 · Free
Cimitero Monumentale
This is not a morbid suggestion. Milan’s monumental cemetery, opened in 1866, is one of the great open-air sculpture collections in Europe — a century and a half of funerary art spanning Liberty, Art Deco, and rationalism, laid out across twenty-five hectares of complete silence. The Famedio, the central hall of honour, contains the tombs of Manzoni and Cattaneo. Nobody is here during Design Week. That is precisely the point.
Piazzale Cimitero Monumentale · Tue–Sun 8:00–18:00 · Free
