This is the third drop in our 5-part dossier, your illicit roadmap to Milan Design Week 2025. After tracing the material underworld in 1/5 and diving into immersive installations in 2/5, we’re now fixated on surfaces—finishes, textiles, and decorative edges that insist on being touched.
These six next stops set the rhythm. For the material-obsessed, the surface is the story—gritty, glossy, grainy. No need to look deeper when the exterior already breaks all the rules.
1. Arno Hoogland – Deus Ex Machina: An Ode to MDF
Via Luigi Porro Lambertenghi 3
In his first solo exhibition, presented as part of the Isola Design Festival, Dutch designer Arno Hoogland takes on one of the most overlooked materials in interiors: MDF. Using Unilin Fibralux Biobased—marketed as the most sustainable MDF board currently available—Arno reimagines the material as something poetic, sculptural, and deeply alive. At the heart of Deus Ex Machina is Temple of the Future, an immersive installation built from CNC-milled components. A custom algorithm allows his machine to “dance” with the surface, generating unpredictable, organic geometries that blur the line between craft and code. The result is a powerful study in how overlooked substrates can be transformed through precision and process.
Tocco’s Take:
MDF becomes artefact through digital craftsmanship—its surface milled, rippled, re-skinned until it speaks with presence. One of the clearest demonstrations this week of what finish can do when given centre stage.
2. Ceramica Ostile Open Studio: Glazes With Grit
Via Borsieri 41, Isola
Ceramica Ostile is a studio dedicated to ceramics, education, and material research. For Milan Design Week 2025, the space opens to the public as part of the Isola Design Festival, offering live demonstrations and a close look at the craft behind ceramic surfaces. From lathe-thrown vessels to glazes shaped by chance and fire, the focus is on process, imperfection, and the expressive potential of finish. Among the works are pieces by resident artisan Beatrice Baracca, including a limited-edition cup in Isola’s signature deep blue finishing.
Tocco’s Take:
A working studio where one can observe how surfaces develop—layered, glazed, and refined. A reminder that texture often comes from time, touch, and trial.
3. Rasa: Indian Crafting Traditions”: Exotic Smugglers
Viafarini Gallery, Via Carlo Farini 35, Isola
Curated by Nidhi Chandak and Varun E S from Isola Studio’s India team, Rasa – The Indian Collective brings together over 15 Indian designers and studios at VIAFARINI Gallery. Rooted in the Sanskrit concept of rasa—the emotional resonance of creative expression—the exhibition blends heritage and innovation through materials such as hand-blown glass, marble, textiles, terrazzo made from construction waste, sandstone, bamboo, and woodwork. Highlights include the refined surface sensibility of Intent Made, and a motion sculpture by Anuj Anjaria, Motionworks that reinterprets insect forms through brass and teak.
Tocco’s Take:
Terrazzo, bamboo, and textile finishes here are both tactile and symbolic—offering a layered reading of tradition in transition.
Growing matter(s), Henning Larsen <> Politecnico di Milano
Via Bonardi 9, Milano
This immersive pavilion explores mycelium as a living building material. Constructed from 80 unique mycelium spheres, the pavilion invites visitors into a sensory space where each form tells a different story—cracked, porous, compact, or smooth—responding to its environment. Henning Larson's installation was build in collaboration with Politectico di Milano, and positions mycelium as an active design collaborator—growing, adapting, and decomposing—while challenging static ideas of form and embracing circularity and organic transformation.
Tocco’s Take
Growing matter(s) challenges traditional surface design by embracing the tactile unpredictability of living materials, inviting us to rethink texture as something alive, evolving, and deeply expressive.
5. Masterly – The Dutch in Milano 2025: Bio-Fabrics and Rebel Ceramics
Palazzo dei Giureconsulti, Piazza dei Mercanti
Now in its ninth edition, Masterly – The Dutch in Milano returns to the Palazzo Giureconsulti with the work of over 100 Dutch designers, companies, and design schools. Curated by Nicole Uniquole, the exhibition spans architecture, furniture, textiles, ceramics, accessories, and interior design. Set within a Renaissance landmark near the Duomo, Masterly continues to offer a multi-generational view of Dutch design across disciplines.
Tocco’s Take:
In a single setting, you’ll find textiles reworked through structure, ceramics balancing clarity and texture, and a cultural narrative shaped by making.
6. Euroluce 2025, Lighting Biennial: Glow as a Finish
Fiera Rho, Halls 9-11 & 13-15
First held in 1976, Euroluce returns to the Salone del Mobile as one of the leading international exhibitions dedicated to lighting. With over 300 brands exhibiting, the 2025 edition explores how light shapes our environments—not only as a technical solution but as a material in its own right. The fair spans indoor and outdoor lighting, systems for public and private spaces, and experimental approaches. As part of this year’s edition, the debut Euroluce International Lighting Forum (April 10–11) brings together voices from across design, architecture, biology, and anthropology. Hosted in The Forest of Space, an arena designed by Sou Fujimoto, the two-day programme reflects on the emotional, spatial, and cultural roles of light—foregrounding its impact on how we experience surfaces, moods, and built space.
Tocco’s Take:
While not material in the traditional sense, light here becomes tactile—folded into architecture, diffused through textures, and redefined as a surface condition. A timely inclusion in this chapter—finishing in the atmosphere.
Contraband Wrap-Up
These six—Hoogland’s soulful MDF, Ceramica Ostile’s raw glazes, Rasa’s layered craftsmanship, Henning Larsen’s tactile mycelium spheres, Masterly’s crafted statements, and Euroluce’s light-as-surface experiments—don’t just decorate. They provoke. These are finishes that demand attention, materials that express intent, and surfaces that shape meaning as much as form.
Next up: 4/5 Hybrids & Interfaces: Cross-Disciplinary Material Design
Stay sharp. Stay haptic.
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