Milan Design Week 2014: The Quietly Colorful Home

Nacreous and matte takes on the pastel color palette found in a variety of furnishings

From fashion to photography to furniture, recent years have seen a shift in the creative world’s overarching palette from highly saturated primary colors to a soft range of light corals, sea foams, baby blues, pale yellows and pinks. Some tones lean toward a more shimmery, nacreous vibe that melds well with iridescent glass, while others are definitively matte pastels that serve as harmonious accents in …

Milan Design Week 2014: Six Colorful Sofas

Vibrantly hued settees poking out from the mass of furniture found at this year's fair

Delicate, subtly hued earth tones pervaded seemingly every facet of design in almost every pocket of Milan last week. But the Salone Internazionale del Mobile and its numerous offshoots weren’t wholly packed with rich pastels and copper-congruent colors; like Americans’ favorite (and impossible to find in Italy) gelato topping, bright bits of color were sprinkled around, most noticeably in the sofa sector. Here are six …

ECAL: Delirious Home

A playful look at our relationship with electronics in a modern dwelling

As one of the world’s top design universities, it comes as no surprise that the Industrial Design and Media and Interaction Design students from Lausanne’s ECAL would wow the crowd in Milan with their creative prowess. But their group exhibition, aptly entitled “Delirious Home,” brilliantly showcases how the design principles they learned in school can be humorously applied to the future of the seamlessly connected, …