THE EVENT THAT STOPS THE DESIGN COMMUNITY, 2018 SALONE DEL MOBILE. HERE IS OUR EDIT.

The mood at this year’s Salone del Mobile can be summed up by one word: Emozione. That’s the title of a 1970s album spotted on our last day in Milan when the Vogue Living team dropped in to the exquisite oasis-like interior Six Gallery. Architects and curators David Lopez Quincoces and Fanny Bauer Grung’s transformation of a former monastery into an emotive, fragrant sanctuary complete with soothing soundtrack and a wheat field-covered ceiling created that magic of Milan moments; a sense of poetic calm in the blur of new product launches and brand installations. It’s escapist spaces like these that create a deep sense of resonance and stay imprinted on the mind. New York-based lighting designer Lindsey Adelman sums up the feeling of being inside these interiors as like “being on a high”.

Among other sensorial highs this year was London-based Ambra Medda’s curation of Villa Borsani, a 1940s Modernist dream elegantly dressed in spring blooms by New Zealand-based florist Sophie Wolanski. There was also Caesarstone’s cinematic collaboration with Snarkitecture; the theatre of Dimore Studio’s Bedouin-style tents — set up as a Silk Road-inspired journey inside the darkened rooms of the duo’s 19th-century palazzo-turned-gallery; and one of the most Instagrammed destinations of the week — the soft 1970s tones and laid-back atmosphere of Studiopepe’s Club Unseen.

The 1970s are having a moment — and it feels curiously fresh. The new appeal of the decade of disco, macramé and maximalism may lie in the comfort of nostalgia and in people’s need in uncertain times to wrap themselves up in the warm hug of texture, pattern and unbridled embellishment. But it’s the optimism at the heart of this aesthetic that’s the hero in this 2018 reimagining. The desire for happy design could also be seen in the proliferation of nightclubs as inspiration, from Gufram’s collection shown in dazzling glitter-ball surrounds to CC Tapis’s exhibition of rug designs titled Rave, Rave, Rave. But it was Milanese gallerist Nina Yashar of Nilufar and Parisian desiner India Mahdavi’s collaboration on the club Chez Nina — a moody haven of plush rainbow velvet and hand-painted gilded aluminium de Gournay wallpaper — which was a standout, magically converging disparate eras, materials and cultures.

“My dream, since I was very young, was to have a bar,” says Yashar, who, like her friend Mahdavi, was born in Tehran. “Mixing patterns and colours is something that we do in a very free way because this is very specific to our upbringing, and to Iran,” explains Mahdavi. “This is my portrait of Nina… but the space is also about giving comfort and I think we all need comfort — that human moment where you sit down, relax and stop because we’re always running.” The continued rise of biophilia was also significant — the human desire to seek connection with nature realised via a profusion of varying shades of he integration of plant life into showrooms, nd lighting. There was also a deeper focus able design. Waste No More, an exhibition by American fashion designer Eileen hlighted the emerging circular economy tive to the traditional ‘make, use, ››