Each spring, Milano Design Week attracts a colorful crowd of design aficionados to Milan. For the duration of a week, they have the key to the city. Fuorisalone, the extensive side-program, sprinkles the city with shows, events, and apéritivos. This year, one of its main attractions, Alcova (Studio Vedèt & Space Caviar), leads the design crowds outside the city, opening the doors to two villas in Varedo: Villa Bagatti Valsecchi (16th century–1890) and Villa Borsani (1945). 

Keys are the topic of the exhibit that greets us in the entrance courtyard of Villa Borsani. The outer wall of the courtyard is lined with a grid of leaden slabs, each imprinted with keys. Next to it, a series of small leaden plates with key imprints are hung close together, much like in a filing cabinet. The series of key imprints by German artist Cengiz Hartmann makes us wonder which doors these keys once unlocked. His work can be seen as a metaphor of loss in today’s wartime context. While the keys have been preserved, the homes they once belonged to are lost. Hartmann’s sensorial work resonates with the context in which it is situated—Villa Borsani was built during World War II and completed in 1945. Indoors, we find a rich interior with built-in fixtures, plaster molded ceilings, patterned marble and wooden floors, temporarily housing a variety of design pieces. 

Back in Milan, sipping orange wine from fine tear-dropped coupes and picking red cherry tomatoes and purple stuffed radicchio leaves from pointy metal pins (Sophie Lou Jacobsen and AnanasAnanas) at Caffè Populaire (Lambert & Fils and DWA Design Studio) located in the NoLo neighborhood, it is hard not to indulge in the many aesthetic and culinary delights of the Fuorisalone. Colorful chalices made from solidified poured material are presented on a block of faux white marble, folded from patterned paper. Things never are what they seem. It is getting late. Time to return to our Airbnb: do you have the keys?

gv.