When William Morris published his lecture The smaller arts of life in 1877, he posed a question that his audience was not quite ready to take seriously: why should the objects that surround us every day – the chair, the table, the cup – be treated as smaller than the painting that hangs above them?
The lecture did not so much resolve the question as trigger it, and the reverberations have run through the design discourse ever since – resurfacing, with a certain kind of institutional confidence, in the growing circuit of collective design exhibitions that had come to occupy a prominent place in the world of contemporary design. Which brought us to stands 9 to 11 of the Fiera Milano exhibition space in Rho, where Salon Rarities – his new department Furniture exhibition dedicated to limited edition design, antiques and high craftsmanship – held its inaugural edition last April.
1882© Ltd, Salone Raritas 2026 ©Saverio Lombardi Vallauri
13 DESSERTS, Salone Raritas 2026 ©Saverio Lombardi Vallauri
Mitterand Gallery, Salone Raritas 2026 ©Saverio Lombardi Vallauri
Inner vision, Salone Raritas 2026 ©Saverio Lombardi Vallauri
Consorzio La Permanente Mobili Cantù, Salone Raritas 2026 ©Saverio Lombardi Vallauri
Abi, Salone Raritas 2026 ©Saverio Lombardi Vallauri
Botticelli Antiquities and Alessandra di Castro, Salone Raritas 2026 ©Saverio Lombardi Vallauri
Inner vision, Salone Raritas 2026 ©Saverio Lombardi Vallauri
Massimo Lunardo Edizioni, Salone Raritas 2026 ©Saverio Lombardi Vallauri
Hering Berlin, Salone Raritas 2026 ©Saverio Lombardi Vallauri
Galerie Zippenfenig, Salone Raritas 2026 ©Saverio Lombardi Vallauri
Max Radford Gallery, Salone Raritas 2026 ©Saverio Lombardi Vallauri
Material, Salone Raritas 2026 ©Saverio Lombardi Vallauri
Mercado Moderno, Salone Raritas 2026 ©Saverio Lombardi Vallauri
Officine Saffi, Salone Raritas 2026 ©Saverio Lombardi Vallauri
Parasite 2.0 x Bianco67, Salone Raritas 2026 ©Saverio Lombardi Vallauri
Paradisoterrestre, Salone Raritas 2026 ©Saverio Lombardi Vallauri
Serafini, Salone Raritas 2026 ©Saverio Lombardi Vallauri
Nilufar Gallery, Salone Raritas 2026 ©Saverio Lombardi Vallauri
Edited by Annalisa Rosso and equipped by Form ghostthe new section brought together a selection of international galleries in a space designed to give each its own voice while maintaining a cohesive curation. The aspiration was genuine, the execution was allegedly considered and the intention – to deliver collectible design in direct contact with the professional market of architects, interior designers, developers and hospitality operators – it was both commercially readable and culturally plausible.
What was harder to ignore was the extent to which this much-anticipated part of the exhibition came: the announcement positioned it at once as a response to market evolution, a platform for cultural legitimacy, a bridge between the unique and the serial, and a dedicated space for a sector of industry in visible transformation – ambitions that, together, exerted significant pressure on any built environment. That Form ghostThe design of the space – a porous, rhythmic architectural landscape designed to allow each gallery to maintain its own identity within a single curatorial framework – responded to this pressure as it did, and was, by most accounts, a genuine achievement.
However, one thing the department immediately recognized was the seriousness of its geographical and typological ambition. The twenty-five galleries assembled for the inaugural edition came from truly diverse design cultures, and the series was more than just decorative.
Italian Galleries – LilyBotticelli Antiquity & Alessandra Di Castro, Paradiso terrestre, SERAPHI, Studio Francesco Faccin with Battaglia Art Foundry, PARASITE 2.0 X WHITE67 – joined by a European body engaged in formal research and writing practice: Side Gallery, Mitterrand Gallery, Zippenfenig Gallery, Max Radford Gallery, 1882 Ltd. Further out, Modern Market brought Brazilian modernism into the conversation. ABI and Jazz Maison by A1Architects introduced perspectives from culturally emergent contexts; Herzog & de Meuron x Marta Sala Éditions and ZAHA HADID ARCHITECTS x NEUTRA translated architectural thinking into collectibles.
Site specific work by Sabine Marcelis Studio, Xavier Lust, Job Smeets for Mouromtsev Design Editionsin parallel HERING BERLIN and 13 Dessertsexpanded the field even further. Overall, the roster made a quiet argument that a context traditionally associated with industrial production could have this kind of sophistication – and that Salone’s professional audience of architects, developers and hospitality operators with real commissioning power were exactly the kind of audience capable of enabling it.
The president of Salone, Maria Porrohad spoken of a post-scientific creative culture and invoked William Morris as a precedent for the coexistence of industrial and one-off production, and the historical analogy was not wrong, in the sense that he identified a recurring tension in design’s self-understanding.
What it necessarily covered was the difference in context, if not stakes. Morris had created an argument against the dehumanizing logic of industrial manufacture, and this argument brought a genuine social aspiration beneath its aesthetic surface – the applied arts as a form of insistence on the value of the manufactured thing and the person who made it.
The collector circuit design which Salone Rare tried to institutionalize operated in a rather different register: galleries are not alternatives to the market but highly sophisticated expressions of it, and rarity here functioned less as a moral position than as a structural condition of production. This is not, in itself, a criticism – there is a legitimate debate about items being made with extreme care in very small numbers, and some of the strictest professionals in this area are doing just that.
There was, in fact, a continuum between what Morris and his circle were attempting and what the most highly regarded professionals in the collecting field were attempting, which was to recover formal rigor in utility objects, to insist that beauty and function need not be mutually exclusive, to reassert craft knowledge as a legitimate form of intelligence.
Where the analogy is strained is the question of direction – the applied arts tradition oriented towards the democratization of quality, the collecting market moving, structurally, in reverse, as edition sizes shrank and objects migrated from use to acquisition. Holding both realities simultaneously, without losing the balance between them, is perhaps the most interesting intellectual position. But have we reached this balance?
The Salone team had indicated this Rare it’s here to stay and there was real value in that continuity – it’s harder to have a serious discussion the first or fourth time around, and the cumulative presence of the section in the exhibition calendar could, over time, provide the kind of depth that an inaugural edition couldn’t.
What remained to be seen was how this continuity could be used: either to entrench an existing logic of the market, or to gradually open up a more reflective space – where the conditions surrounding the collective design could become part of the conversation, and where the distance between the workshop and the commercial exhibition could be recognized rather than quietly folded into the rhetoric of cultural aspiration.
