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'A polyphonic map of international creativity' comes alive at the RoCollectible 2025, exhibited by Galleria Rossana Orlandi at Milan Design Week 2025. Located within the city's prestigious fashion mecca, the Monte Napoleone District, and orchestrated by the gallery founder Rossana Orlandi and her daughter Nicoletta Brugnoni, the design exhibition presents a nuanced yet unpretentious visage of contemporary design. As Orlandi tells STIR, the collectible is set amid "plenty of ideas, amazing projects…full of beauty and creativity," offering works of more than 90 established designers and emerging talents in a journey traversing "material experimentation and a dialogue between the past and the future".
Here are a few curious offerings from the showcase.
The Power of Tenderness by Aline Asmar d’Amman
Lebanese architect Aline Asmar d’Amman unveils a transformative collection titled The Power of Tenderness, unpacking a gentle yet formidable dialogue of design with matter, memory and beauty. Rooted in a philosophy that coalesces the raw appeal of untamed marble with the finesse of literary culture, Amman’s collectible designs feature the brutalist bookshelves, Béton Littéraire, the upcycled Stone Cloud side tables from The Memory of Stones collection, the sinuous Georgia seating collection and the intricately tailored Soft Shell tables.
EMOTIONS PASSION BURGUNDY. ARTIGIANI POLACCHI by Craftica Gallery
Warsaw-based Craftica Gallery debuts at the design festival, heralding a bold metamorphosis in the global narrative of Polish craft with EMOTIONS PASSION BURGUNDY. ARTIGIANI POLACCHI, where the burgundy colour unifies works imbued with material memory and meticulous authorship. Polish sculptor Anna Bera’s tactile works from the Fragment series sport mirror-polished steel surfaces, exploring the physicality of matter and space. “The whole idea behind the series is to combine small pieces and fragments and join them together where one piece obscures the other,” Bera shares with STIR at the design fair. Meanwhile, artist Maciej Gąsienica-Giewont’s utilitarian wood-turned pieces exalt the inherent beauty of nature's imperfections in green wood. At the same time, sculptor and printmaker Marek Bimer’s lighting designs, transformed by his proprietary fusion of rust, pigment, metals and resin, reveal the balance between luminosity and structure, whereas visual artist and ceramicist Alicja Patanowska’s cobalt We Are the Weather 2 sculptures evoke fluid intricacies through their fractured surfaces.
Organoid, Nexus and Flow collections by Cyryl Zakrzewski
Polish artist Cyryl Zakrzewski’s design oeuvre, epitomised by the experimental Organoid Cabinet, fuses seemingly chaotic wood with recycled plastic to forge a delicate balance between nature and human ingenuity. Meanwhile, the Nexus Collection, manifested in hand-sculpted lamps, armchairs and coffee tables, exemplifies the liaison between organic craftsmanship and technological innovation, while the Flow Collection distils the spirit of motion into minimalist furnishings.
Morfa and Eche Collections by Lucas Recchia
Brazilian designer Lucas Recchia explores the evocative beauty of broken glass with the Eche Collection, featuring a sofa and armchair suspended on raw bronze bases. Elsewhere, the Morfa series, presenting handcrafted fused glass tables and reinterpreted bronze tables, mirrors a centuries-old casting tradition with its semi-polished patina that oscillates between rawness and refinement.
The furniture designer’s Material Distortion Collection, with hand-welded bronze rings interlaced with molten glass, generates vessels and mirrors that poetically distort form and reflection, culminating in the Tripod and Cavo tables. These limited-edition pieces embody Recchia’s exploration of weight, space and structure while manifesting a harmonious interplay between digital precision and tactility.
Sculpt Chair by Paul Heijnen
Culminating the years of unwavering research in transforming experimental techniques into a functional masterpiece, Dutch designer Paul Heijnen’s Sculpt Chair is reminiscent of ”the marbled covers of antique books and the layered depth of Fordite gems,” the press note states. “Inspired by Japanese Nerikomi ceramics, Mokume-gane metalwork and impressionist colour palettes,” the chair emerges from thin slats of steam-bent wood and is reimagined with a breakthrough method for solidifying oil paint into a malleable sculptural medium.
Unlimited by Nacho Carbonell
The Unlimited light installation by Spanish visual artist Nacho Carbonell deftly intertwines materiality with ethereal luminosity, where cast bronze forms extend into radiant branches crafted from delicately coloured glass dust. Developed in collaboration with Italian light manufacturer Luce5, the lighting design encapsulates the cyclical vitality and transformative growth of nature, evoking the organic progression of life. As Carbonell notes, his pieces are designed to be “communicative objects that arouse one’s feelings and imagination...that allow you to escape everyday life," a philosophy vividly animated in Unlimited’s dynamic reciprocity of light and form.
High Vase and Key Full of Memories by Cengiz Hartmann
German artist Cengiz Hartmann crafts sculptural art, distilling the essence of poetic minimalism while encapsulating his philosophy of Begreifen, which implies “to touch and to understand, in a way thinking with the hands,” he explains. In his High Vases, fresh wood is hand-carved with attached legs and buried in the ground, allowing minerals to imbue each form with a distinct earthy hue. In parallel, the Key Full of Memories series reimagines the symbolic nature of keys crafted from twelve meticulously rolled lead pieces, each embedded with the memory of old keys hammered into submission, suggesting that while keys both lock and unlock, the true residual is the repository of experiences they carry.
Keep up with STIR’s coverage of Milan Design Week 2025, where we spotlight the most compelling exhibitions, presentations and installations from top studios, designers and brands. Dive into the highlights of Euroluce 2025 and explore all the design districts—Fuorisalone, 5Vie, Brera, Isola, Durini, and beyond—alongside the faceted programme of Salone del Mobile.Milano this year.
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