Milan Design Week 2019: how London's innovative young designers wowed the international design fair

London’s most adventurous artists and designers went to Milan Design Week to wow an international crowd with their work. Their imagination and expertise was laced with wit and there was the odd bonkers break-out.

In an old industrial setting downtown in the Italian capital of fashion and design was a crazy outdoor “sculpture” by Alex Chinneck. The Forest Gate artist is known for trompe-l’oeil street art and here he had “unzipped” the façades of two factory buildings, which appeared to peel away.

While in Milan, RCA graduate Bethan Laura Wood — known in Britain for her flamboyant dress sense — scooped a 2019 Elle Deco International Design Award for flooring with her Super Fake rug for Italian brand cc-tapis.

Wood also made a shimmering metal tree to celebrate champagne brand Perrier-Jouët and introduced china for Rosenthal, along with lighting for exclusive gallery Nilufar.

Sir Paul Smith put his signature stripes on to an edition of Stack ceramics, pairing up with Emily Johnson of 1882 Ltd, a fifth-generation family firm from the pottery heartlands of Stoke-on-Trent.

Piles of individually coloured hand-glazed plates with centres cut away are fired so that the glaze fuses them together, then glass liners turn the stacks of varying sizes into vases.

Some London designers took a message to Milan, notably Ilse Crawford of Studioilse in SE1, whose twin mantras are “human-centred” design and natural materials. “Think natural, think local,” she says.

Her gentle no-dye no-bleach rugs, cushions and throws for Spanish brand Nanimarquina are a soft medley of cream, caramel and chocolate in hand-spun Afghan wool, nettle, jute, linen and Tussar silk, sourced as near to Marquina’s Indian artisan makers as possible.

London-based, Australian-born eco-activist Brodie Neill has invented “ocean terrazzo” and cast it into a robust table for an exhibition called Guiltless Plastic, assembled by the charismatic gallery owner Rossana Orlandi, whose designer pals were re-fashioning plastic waste.

Also featured was a tall lamp in coils of recycled plastic by Londoner James Shaw.

Also recycling were students from the Royal College of Art, in an engaging group display.

On four-hour treks along the Thames foreshore, Max Hornaecker had collected medieval and Victorian pottery, coins, clay pipes, bones and glass fragments, along with mobile phones and plastic cutlery. He’s turned these discards into fine craft — little holders for iPhones and sticky tape, hooks, business card cases and more. Colleague Erin Karlsson had turned wood ash into detergents, while others made a material they called sea stone from discarded seafood shells.

Small but feisty London lighting brands held their own against Italian giants such as Flos and Artemide. This was at Euroluce, the lighting show sitting alongside the giant Salone del Mobile.Milano furniture fair, which is at the heart of Milan Design Week.

Innermost, based in Oxo Tower, SE1, showed a compact rechargeable light you can carry in a backpack. East London’s Tala made lamps from broken solar panels, and south London’s ever-elegant Cypriot-born Michael Anastassiades reduced pendant lighting to simple black strips (michaelanastassiades.com).

London excels in luxury interiors and the capital’s upmarket decorators had found themselves exotic spots.

Amy Somerville put sumptuous British-made velvet, lacquer and gilt pieces into a marble-floored room filled with tapestries and carved wood at a Renaissance home-cum-museum. New Planetaria furniture from west London’s Slovenia-born Lara Bohinc has oversized orbs and cylinders.

Tim Butcher and Lizzie Deshayes of Chelsea Harbour’s Fromental kitted out the romantic apartment of Milan-based US interior decorator Eric Egan.

New versions of their hand-painted Chinese wallpapers flaunt a vibrant abstract and a “bargello” zigzag flame-stitch. And Shoreditch artist Faye Toogood transferred fanciful female faces to large-scale wallpapers for American brand Calico.

Design today is a global affair, with London product designers in demand. Barber & Osgerby, whose Olympic Torch lit their path to fame in 2012, now have an ever-expanding classy clientele.

They’ve done a new enamelled steel table for US Knoll and lights made of granite and porcelain for Hermès. Their “infinitely recyclable” chair, appropriately called On & On, for American maker Emeco, is made mainly from discarded PET bottles; the black ones have pigment from car tyres.

The Industrial Facility partnership unexpectedly combined steel and pine in a surprising chair for Mattiazzi, from Viaduct, and Ross Lovegrove’s curvy furniture in striped wood is for Natuzzi.

Finally, the Zaha Hadid Design studio nurtures the late architect’s curvy aesthetic in furniture for Sawaya & Moroni.