Alcova 2025 makes a case for beauty in urban decay at Milan Design Week

It’s the contrast that catches you off guard. While across the city, commercial windows and balconies have remained covered for weeks in preparation for Milan Design Week 2025, only to unveil perfect products in pristine settings – clean floors, polished handles, invisible glass – Alcova offers something entirely different.

For the nomadic platform, urban decay and the slow deterioration of once-immaculate spaces have, year after year, set the stage for the creative energy that breathes within them. Previous events have taken visitors inside a former panettone-cake factory in NoLo (from which the project took its name), a military hospital in Baggio, and the Ex Macello in Viale Molise. For its 2025 edition, the design platform founded by Valentina Ciuffi (Studio Vedèt) and Joseph Grima (Space Caviar) returns with a compelling blend of old favourites and bold new settings: the historic Villa Borsani and Villa Bagatti Valsecchi, joined by two dramatic new venues – the former SNIA factory, once a hub of synthetic fibre production, and the evocative Pasino Glasshouses, formerly one of Europe’s largest white orchid cultivations.

Alcova takes over modernist masterpiece Villa Borsani for Milan Design Week 2025

These locations – where nature reclaims architecture – house exhibitions that connect deeply to their surroundings, showcasing both emerging voices and established names in design. ‘The addition of these two venues came naturally,’ says co-founder Valentina Ciuffi. ‘Not only did we discover them last year and found them incredible, but they’re also on the same route as Villa Bagatti Valsecchi. We thought it would be interesting to invite people to take a small journey to reach them. But that doesn't mean we would not consider returning to a small yet magical space in the future.’ Also, she corrects us, this year there are technically five locations: ‘We’re also returning to Milan proper with Vocla – a new space open late, featuring exhibitions, a bar, and a restaurant.’

This year, as always, Alcova takes a non-thematic approach, explains co-founder Joseph Grima. ‘We don’t see Alcova as an exhibition, but as a snapshot of what design is today. Our goal is to create the strongest possible resonance between the content and the container, which are the places themselves,’ says Grima. ‘At Villa Borsani, the focus is on domesticity and design as something refined and poetic, with a renewed interest in both experimentation and craftsmanship. At SNIA, we tap into design’s industrial side. In the greenhouses, the experimental leans toward the artistic design, while Villa Bagatti Valsecchi becomes a kind of summary, culminating in a surprising site-specific installation in the Ghiacciaia, or old icehouse.’

As always, Villa Bagatti Valsecchi remains the beating heart of Alcova – a 19th-century gem adorned with antique statues, frescoed halls, and a vast park made for wandering. In its historic fountain stands ‘Sun Catcher’ by Rive Roshan and SOL-R&D, a luminous arch that literally captures solar energy. Starting from the underground level, the Shakti Design Residency presents the results of young, talented designers who collaborated with India’s leading collectible design studios. Studio Shaw, led by Shaw Lu, introduces nearly illusory metal lamps inspired by Étienne-Louis Boullée’s unrealised cenotaph for Newton.

In the villa’s elegant salons, futuristic lighting objects by Theophile Blandet made from discarded high-precision lab equipment in Timișoara coexist with poetic concrete lamps by Italian studio Plato Design. Elsewhere, there's the ‘Betsy Collection’, a feathery leather-covered furniture ensemble designed by Lara Bohinc for Uniqka. Meanwhile, the 'Habitare Materials & Objects' exhibition brings a joyful, hands-on approach to sustainable design with its Material Bar – an interactive space where visitors can try foraging and distilling local gin, cultivating mushrooms at home, crafting tinctures, and even creating zero-waste garments from geometric fabric pieces.

In the Ghiacciaia, not to be missed are the mesmerising rotating structures by Studio Noké. Another highlight is found over in the Scuderie, where Belgium is Design unveils ‘Woven Whispers’, a major textile design exhibition that sees fabrics transformed into wall art, hammocks, chair covers, and patchworks stitched from vintage shirts.

Next door, one of the new venues – the Pasino Glasshouses – still bears traces of its botanical past, now tangled with wild overgrowth. Here, Marcin Rusak Studio (Rusak’s grandfather bred orchids) presents ‘Ghost Orchids’, poetic biodegradable sculptures that reflect on beauty and decay. Greek Marble x Objects of Common Interest take centre stage with ‘Soft Horizons’, a dreamy reinterpretation of Greek marble, while Terraformæ – a lab born out of the historic Fornace Sant’Anselmo – offers an expressive terracotta trilogy. Also intriguing is Avau Parfum, a third-generation perfumery brand, which, in collaboration with DWA Design Studio, introduces conical metal sheets that unfold into fragrant, sculptural olfactory architecture.

Just a ten-minute walk away, the rationalist structure of the former SNIA factory evokes the raw energy of early Alcova editions. As glass panes rattle, Decibel Made demonstrates large-scale 3D printing live, while towering in the centre of the room are the powerful black forms of Under the Volcano, a new lava stone furniture collection by Francesco Meda and David Lopez Quincoces. Adding drama in the background are monolithic projects by Habitare – an exploration of the materials of the future.

The final jewel in this immersive journey is the Villa Borsani, a modernist masterpiece built in 1945 by Osvaldo Borsani. Once welcoming guests like Lucio Fontana, Gio Ponti, and Fausto Melotti, this week it buzzes with life as design crowds fill its rooms. Here, Japanese ceramics brand Noritake debuts a new tableware collection, presented by British designer Faye Toogood, who also hand-painted a series of delicate pieces titled ‘Rose’, inspired by her English garden. The villa’s iconic and much-Instagrammed staircase is lit up by wooden chairs from the Nick Ross x Contem Forniture collaboration.

Upstairs, VOIDS by Objects of Common Interest channels the corrugated steel shop-front rollers of Athens into vibrant resin forms – colourful, sculptural expressions of presence and absence. A note of provocation emerges in the bathroom space, reimagined by Dutch-Indian artist Inderjeet Sandhu with irreverent handcrafted marble artworks and glass vases. The journey culminates with Eleftheria Tseliou’s The Library Project, a continuation of her 2017 gallery exhibition of artist books. Outside, ‘imi’, a collection by Michael Anastassiades for Monstruosus, reinterprets the Grecian urn into ethereal ceramic planters – so delicate, they took years to perfect

Alcova’s Milan Design Week displays are on view at Villa Borsani, Villa Bagatti Valsecchi, Ex Snia and Pasino Glasshouses until 13 April 2025. Tickets are available here

Salone del Mobile 2025 takes place 8-13 April. Check our full Milan Design Week 2025 guide for the must-sees

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