The office of the future at the Salone del Mobile.Milano 2024

Wandering around the stands, we see the proposals from companies supporting this change. Anticipating this desire for hospitality and well-being for all with forward-looking solutions. For Fantoni, the office takes on the guise of a veritable “third space”. Among the innovations at this Salone, the Osoppo-based brand is offering Panorama, an accessorized wall, designed by Ben van Berkel of UNStudio, which can be used to shape twenty different configurations, so ensuring the maximum adaptability both in the space with which it has to engage, and the working methods of the individual teams. Among Martex’s latest proposals, on the other hand, we find integrated solutions that are particularly well suited to the needs of coworking. Within the Nucleo collection, designed by Studio Monica Graffeo, there is, for example, Nucleo Pantry and Nucleo Corner, respectively furniture for coffee breaks equipped with a fridge space adapted to both a breakout area and meeting rooms, and a kitchen counter to be combined with separating panels.

Under the artistic direction of Elisa Ossino, Dieffebi makes Playful Lifestyle a keystone to lighting up collective and office spaces with a positive and energizing touch of color. The company’s top-of-range proposal presented in the spaces of the Salone looks at the Line Bookcase, which through the articulation of solids and voids enables it to interpret both a storage unit and a partition equipped with acoustic panels as required. 

There is no shortage of new furnishing proposals to give substance to the desire for novelty characteristic of every Salone del Mobile.Milano. Mara has made the beauty of the glitch, the unexpected error in the jargon of electronics, the showpiece of one of its new top-end products: from the collaboration with AMDL Circle comes Typo, a chair that stands out by the unexpected folds of the steel profile supporting the wooden backrest. Still on the theme of playfulness, Infiniti presents the extension of the Round&Round collection, designed by Oleg Pugachev. The Round&Roll stool on casters and with a storage base, an emblem of the informal style, is designed to accommodate the spontaneity of the body’s movements, allowing both the feet to move in space and the pelvis to turn thanks to the optional swivel seat. A brand that has evolved towards full integration between office design, living-room design and design lighting, Quadrifoglio Group is present at the Salone del Mobile.Milano with some new products in the world of seating, such as the Clizia chair and the After sofa, both designed by Edi & Paolo Ciani. Thanks to their soft linearity, both items favor multiple modes of insertion in exemplary ways. 

Historic products in the firms’ catalogues have also been renewed to create new and sustainable solutions. Arper presents the new look of Catifa 53, one of its most enduring bestsellers. The brand’s first product to have acquired environmental certification, Catifa has now become carbon negative thanks to the use of PaperShell, a new material that at the end of its life  can be reduced to biochar, a vegetable charcoal that retains CO2 from the previous stages of its life, and becomes a substrate to favor soil fertility. 

The world of finishes at S.Project is also enriched with options that expand the expressive potential of workspaces, whatever they may be. At the fair Alpi presented the result of its new collaborations with GamFratesi (Alpi Wooclé and Alpi Peacock), Konstantin Grcic (Alpi Tramonto) and Piero Lissoni (Alpi North Light), which look respectively at the three-dimensional potential of textures, the iridescent rendering of sunset tones, and the relaxing horizon of Nordic spaces. While Door, a Marche-based company specializing in fabric partition walls, is bringing back a type of mobile threshold that, after the experiments in the Sixties – think of Gio Ponti and Joe Colombo – is revealing new applications and new colors, as we observed in the stand designed by Calvi Brambilla.