MAJA EDWARDS: SHOW ME YOUR SHELVES, I’LL TELL YOU HOW YOU LIVE
Open-concept kitchen. © Jovana Rakezić
Maja looks at the shelves first. They tell her where people have travelled, what they brought home, what they decided to keep and which bits of kitsch they somehow grew to love along the way. To her, a shelf is a far more honest place than a perfectly styled sofa or a painting hung exactly where it is supposed to be.
As an interior designer who lives and works between Serbia and the United States, she has spent years watching two cultures that can now share almost the same visual language while behaving very differently at home. The same kitchen, the same sofa, the same stone, but different rules, different rituals and very different ideas about what should be hidden, displayed, used every day or saved for a better occasion.
If an algorithm can teach us to want the same interiors, can it really teach us to live the same way?
“I want to see where they’ve travelled, where they’ve taken pictures and all the kitschy things they’ve collected. I say that with love!”
SHELVES AND NOSES NEVER LIE
I give her three options, a sofa, a fridge and a bathroom, and ask which tells her the most about a person. She chooses the sofa. When I ask which room most often lies about its owner, she shifts the question slightly and chooses a wardrobe instead. Her eye goes first to the places where our carefully constructed image begins to crack rather than those we have already prepared for other people to see.
Art quickly becomes evidence. “When someone buys an expensive car or watch, the message is crude: I have money. And that’s fine. But when someone hangs a painting by a well-known artist on the wall, the message is much more insidious: Not only do I have money, I also have taste, intellectual depth, education and sophistication. It becomes a status symbol masquerading as spirituality and social validation instead of a genuine connection with the work.”
Coming from someone who tells me early on that diplomacy is rarely what people get from her, nothing gentler should be expected. She applies the same scepticism to her own profession, particularly to rules that, after three months of certified confidence, begin to sound suspiciously like laws of nature.
“Rigid insistence on cohesion. Carrying the same colours and shades from room to room absolutely kills character before the space even gets a chance to breathe. Also the words we now use to define a good interior, things like bespoke and curated.”
Something ugly, on the other hand, can work perfectly. “Absolutely. It’s like someone with a big nose that somehow suits them perfectly.”
She has little interest in editing out everything that refuses to behave. An artificial plant can stay if its owner routinely kills the real ones, a vacuum cleaner can remain an object of genuine affection, and sooner or later the chair in the bedroom will become a wardrobe for clothes that are not quite dirty enough for the laundry. A home does not become less successful because someone has started living in it, and good taste survives a little mess far better than the constant need to prove itself.
THE GUESTS WHO NEVER COME
A huge kitchen in which almost no cooking takes place is America. Three sets of plates kept for special occasions are Serbia. A living room the family almost never uses is America again.
“I think that would be America too. The living room in America exists to be photographed when the house goes on the market, while the kitchen island is where people actually live, not cook. Formal living rooms in America have been sitting untouched for decades, saved for holidays or guests who never arrive. The kitchen island, meanwhile, has absorbed both the dining room and the living room. It’s a desk, a bar, a breakfast table and the epicentre of every house party.”
Square footage can easily begin performing a life that is not actually happening inside it. One room remains almost museum-like, another quietly takes on every function, and eventually the house gives itself away. Serbia has a different kind of excess, a need to store, preserve and keep things in reserve for their rightful moment. Certain glasses, plates or tablecloths can spend years waiting to be considered worthy of use, as though everyday life were slightly too ordinary to deserve them.
Her most Serbian habit has nothing to do with porcelain.
“Not having to pretend I’m happy to see someone when I’m not. I don’t fake an interest in what they did last weekend.”
America gave her something simpler: the air conditioning set to 17°C and never higher. She also identifies more with the American attitude to outdoor living, while Serbia, for her, is more closely associated with the need to find a place, drawer, cupboard or another pocket of storage for absolutely everything.
Open-plan kitchens and living rooms are considerably less appealing.
“Open concept living. I honestly can’t stand it. I prefer a separate or semi-separate kitchen and living room. Open concept gives me no peace. The kitchen constantly reminds me of three things: that I want to eat, that something needs cleaning or that there’s something I should be doing. For me, out of sight really is out of mind. I want a door I can close.”
Sometimes a door is not a barrier but the luxury of finally not having to look at something. Paradoxically, she likes the kitchen island. Walk-in wardrobes too. A guest room, to her, is hospitality, while the formal dining room can die. Bathrooms are underrated and decorative cushions have a remarkable ability to consume an entirely unreasonable amount of money. None of this adds up to a neat theory of the good home, only spaces that work and spaces that expect people to rearrange their lives around them.
A corner of the dining room in warm, natural tones. © Jovana Rakezić
Decorative accents in the interior. © Jovana Rakezić
THE SURFBOARD THAT STAYED IN CHARLESTON
Her husband surfs, and in Charleston they have a beautiful wooden surfboard that lives in the dining room. When they considered bringing it to Belgrade, they decided against it.
“Surfboards. My husband surfs and has this beautiful wooden surfboard that normally lives in our dining room as a decorative piece as well, and we wanted to bring it to Belgrade when we moved. But however beautiful it is, it would look completely out of place here.”
Some things lose their meaning the moment they change postcode. Objects travel easily, images even more so, but context is far less mobile. Climate, she says, determines aesthetics 200 per cent, and she can distinguish almost instantly an English house from a French apartment, Bali from Los Angeles or Palm Springs.
The internet has produced a strange effect. We can now order the appearance of somewhere else with extraordinary precision without necessarily importing the reasons that appearance existed there in the first place. Style travels quickly, habits much more slowly.
Asked what Europe exported to America long ago, only to see it sold back as a distinct aesthetic category, she answers: “European oak floors. WTF is that?!”
WHITE BOUCLÉ FABRIC. STOP, JUST STOP.
There is one word she distrusts even more than European oak: timeless.
“I honestly don’t even know what that means anymore. I say exactly that to a client if they tell me they want something timeless. That’s why I communicate much more visually with clients now. My definition of timelessand their definition of timeless can be two completely different design concepts. If I simply nod and pretend I know what they mean, the project is already heading in the wrong direction before it has even begun.”
A handful of words now do half the work of taste for us, timeless, curated, bespoke, and they sound precise until two people are asked to draw what they mean.
She loves wallpaper and says she probably always will because she sits somewhere on the edge of maximalism, although clients tend to have an intense love-hate relationship with it. White bouclé is a much simpler matter.
“White boucle fabric. Stop, just STOP.”
When I ask which element of today’s homes time will expose most quickly, she refuses to forecast trends.
“I don’t know. I genuinely don’t have a smart answer or a stupid one. Time has been on such a strange trajectory ever since AI entered the picture that I honestly have no idea!”
AI enters the conversation somewhere beyond the usual question of whether it will take designers’ jobs, because what is changing is the speed at which an image can be made, circulated, copied and exhausted. Until recently, we could look at an interior and place it within a decade with reasonable confidence; now it is becoming harder to guess how long today’s visual language will remain stable at all.
Timeless was never an especially precise word, and in a moment when AI can generate endless variations of familiar aesthetics in seconds, it becomes stranger still. It once took ten years for something to start looking distinctly 2016; now three months and a good algorithm can do the job.
Trends matter less to her than what remains once the photographer has left, how the room looks six months later, what people actually use, what ends up on the chair and whether someone can walk around their bed without climbing over it, or whether a developer has managed to sell another few square metres as a bedroom.
Her process begins neither with a material nor an image, but with an imagined life inside the space.
“It’s honestly always on my mind while I’m working on a project. I’m a huge advocate of self-hypnosis and meditation. My working day literally never starts without it. I enter that state and first visualise real life in the space in great detail: how the children move through the hallway, where they put down their morning glass of water, how they move around. Only once I can see and feel it do I start working. I use these techniques for everything in life, not just work, because you know what they say: how you do anything is how you do everything.”
By the end of our conversation, we are talking less about how a space looks and more about what the body does inside it without thinking, where a hand puts down a glass, how a child moves through a hallway and how good a design can really be if it requires us to become a tidier, more disciplined version of ourselves every single day. Every good interior eventually loses the battle with the bedside table.
“The bedside tables. Even though they probably have a drawer, nobody is going to use it. A little ecosystem will develop on top: glasses, medication, plastic water bottles and sleep masks.”
That small ecosystem may be closer to home than most things that ever make it into an interior photograph, because it needs no styling, only a habit repeated often enough to claim its own place.
In the end, it comes back to the shelves. Travel photographs, a gift we would never have bought for ourselves, something expensive sitting next to something completely worthless, a piece of kitsch that somehow became precious, all the things that are difficult to explain through style and even harder to standardise.
Perhaps we really are all looking at the same interiors, but we are not, at least not yet, living the same way.
Carefully selected art pieces and textures in the dining space. © Jovana Rakezić
DOOQ: A NEW GEOGRAPHY OF DESIGN
Mosaico sofa by Studiopepe
Portugal has been attracting the attention of the interiors world for years, for reasons that go well beyond the new hotels and restaurants of Lisbon and Porto. Behind the image most people now recognise sits a much older network of factories, workshops, stone and wood specialists, metalworkers, ceramicists and generations of makers who understand how an object is put together from the inside out. Portuguese design may have reached a wider international audience relatively recently, but the skills and production culture behind it have been there for far longer.
DOOQ grew out of that environment, and its collections are difficult to place within a single school or decade. The 1970s surface in the volumes, Art Deco appears in the geometry and polished metal, Italian design in the proportions, while some pieces recall old hotel interiors where stone, dark wood and one very good armchair could hold an entire room together. The references are there, but they remain loose enough to let the furniture belong to the present.
PORTUGUESE MAKING BEHIND CONTEMPORARY DESIGN
Pliè tables and consoles, Mosaico modular sofas, armchairs and poufs, Twin benches and poufs, Slide sofas, armchairs and chairs, Nest and Cubu chairs, the Nouvelle Donne dining table, the Colin armchair and Milano tables and consoles offer a clear view of the range. The pieces differ in scale and purpose, while proportion, material and detailing create continuity across the collection.
Much of DOOQ’s appeal comes down to material. Wood, metal, stone, glass and ceramics are built into the structure of the pieces, influencing their weight, balance and the way they change under different light. Portuguese production becomes most apparent at close range, in the treatment of an edge, the junction between two surfaces, the scale of a metal detail or the way a stone element resolves a line.
Mosaico armchair by Studiopepe, Dooq
Cubu chair, Colin armchair, Twin bench, Nusa Dinning Table
MOSAICO, PLIÈ AND SLIDE: FURNITURE AS PART OF THE ROOM
Mosaico makes the changing relationship between furniture and architecture particularly clear. Its broad modules can divide a large room, redirect movement or establish a new centre within a space, moving well beyond the old assumption that a sofa belongs against a wall. The proportions remain composed even at a larger scale, which makes Mosaico easy to imagine in a private home, a hotel or a lobby where furniture plays a genuine role in organising the plan.
Pliè works with fewer elements. Its consoles, side tables and centre tables are built from slender planes, curved lines and carefully judged relationships between metal and form, which allows them to sit easily beside art, stone, textured walls or an old wooden chair from a completely different period. Those combinations tend to create more interesting rooms than trying to furnish everything from one series.
Slide develops across modular and conventional sofas, an armchair, chairs and poufs, while Nest and Cubu remain more compact through their dining and bar chair formats. Twin appears as a bench and in two pouf variations, giving these pieces enough independence to work on their own without pulling the rest of the family into the room.
That independence matters even more when a piece enters an interior that already has a history. Mosaico beside something inherited, Pliè beneath a large painting or Cubu next to a table made several decades earlier can produce a richer setting than a room furnished from one programme. Interiors rarely come together all at once. They accumulate art, things brought back from travel, gifts, inherited objects, furniture that has already lived somewhere else and, every so often, one new piece that changes the balance of everything around it.
Pliè Collection, Dooq
Slide Couch
Mosaico sofa by Studiopepe
DOOQ IN DISCOVER: SELECTION AND PROCUREMENT FOR ARCHITECTURAL PROJECTS
The collaboration between DOOQ and not a studio. begins from that same idea. Discover will present a considered selection of pieces, while the partnership extends into specification and procurement for individual projects, alongside interiors and editorial content that place DOOQ in a lived architectural context. The brand’s regional presence can therefore develop through real rooms and real applications, with each project drawing from the collection according to what it actually needs.
The current collection opens that collaboration and makes clear why DOOQ belongs in Discover. The differences between the pieces are substantial enough to make individual selection the most rewarding way to approach them, with each one considered in relation to the room, the architecture and the life it will eventually become part of.
Image courtesy of DOOQ
BRAND PORTFOLIO
A RENTAL APARTMENT THAT DOESN’T FEEL TEMPORARY
Stefan Miloš
An interior in New Belgrade’s Airport Garden combines custom joinery, eucalyptus veneer, natural textures and a distinctly Dutch sense of practicality in a home designed to change tenants without losing its character.
Words: Danilo Mašković
Interior Design: Stefan Miloš
Photography: Stefan Miloš
Rental apartments often end up in the same neutral territory. Calm enough for anyone, anonymous enough to be forgotten. Here, the idea was the opposite: to create a space that could change occupants without losing the feeling of a home.
Much of the interior was custom made. Eucalyptus veneer runs through the kitchen and built-in storage, while the cabinetry is treated as one continuous composition rather than a set of separate elements. Darker timber, muted green and warm lighting give the kitchen a more settled, domestic tone.
The dining area has something of a veranda about it. A round table and timber chairs introduce an easy informality and the sense of a place meant for gathering, eating and staying longer than planned. That warmth matters more here than the usual expectation that a rental interior should remain entirely neutral.
The living area is built around natural textures and a few clear accents. Pieces by HKliving, a work by a young artist and a pendant light from the Netherlands give the room rhythm without turning it into a collection of design objects. There is a subtle retro note too, expressed through proportion, palette and individual pieces rather than overt nostalgia.
The shelving and media cabinet take their colours from an unexpected reference. Their earthy, reddish tones look to Wadi Rum in Jordan, to desert sand and layered rock formations. The effect brings something warmer, almost geological, into an otherwise pragmatic European interior.
At its core is a distinctly Dutch practicality, loosened by just enough funkier detail to keep the apartment from becoming too serious. Everything has a clear function, but there is still room for colour, art and objects that are not there simply to complete the picture.
Perhaps that is the right balance for a rental home: ready to change, without ever looking as though it is merely waiting for the next tenant.
TERRA FORMA. THE BODY DOESN’T ALWAYS HAVE TO BE A PROJECT
Stefan Miloš
Commercial Interior | Fitness & Wellness
Belgrade, Serbia | 2026
Interior design: Stefan Miloš
Words: Danilo Mašković
3D visualizations: Stefan Miloš
The starting point was clear: to create a tribute to women who take care of themselves without reducing their relationship with their bodies to a mirror, a number, or the constant feeling that there is always something left to fix.
I was interested in what a gym could become once we move beyond a culture that has taught us to treat the body as a never-ending project. Better, slimmer, tighter, younger. I wanted to approach it from somewhere else entirely, through health, routine, pleasure, and that one hour of the day that belongs only to us.
I imagined the space almost as an extension of home. Not as a retreat from the world, but as a place where, for a moment, we are free from the obligation of being seen through someone else’s eyes. Earthy tones, wood, stone, curved forms and subdued lighting came naturally. I wasn’t interested in making the interior look “feminine”. Quite the opposite. I wanted it to understand who it was designed for, without having to explain that through colour, decoration or stereotype.
That became the most important part of the project for me. I didn’t want to create another backdrop for the ideal body, but a space for real bodies and real lives. For exercise that isn’t punishment for what we ate, preparation for summer, or yet another obligation to look better. For the simple idea that taking care of ourselves doesn’t have to begin with being dissatisfied with who we are.
The space has since been completed, although the project took a different direction along the way and moved away from the concept I originally developed. What you see here is therefore not a record of the finished interior, but my original response to the brief, with the colours, atmosphere and ideas that defined the project for me from the beginning.
And perhaps that is precisely why it is worth showing. Architecture is not only what eventually gets built. Sometimes, what could have been is worth keeping too.
Why Architecture Cannot Exist Without the Resistance of Reality
What is most often presented today as an entry into design is, in reality, an accelerated course in image production. Fast, accessible, and built on the promise that producing a convincing render is enough to deliver a project. This logic holds as long as the project remains a frame on a screen. The moment it needs to become space, a layer of work emerges that these courses do not address.
The idea that space can exist as an image is not new. In the 18th century, Giovanni Battista Piranesi built his reputation on thousands of engravings that operated at the edge of fiction. His interiors and urban visions function precisely because they were never required to answer how they would be built, used, or sustained. Space exists as an idea, free from material, cost, and time.
In practice, his built work is far more limited. His most notable project, Santa Maria del Priorato in Rome, demonstrates what happens when a drawing must become a wall. At that point, dimension, structure, material, and maintenance come into play.
And then there is the image that visitors look for today when they arrive in Rome — the keyhole view precisely framing St. Peter’s Basilica. It reflects the same instinct present in his drawings, but here it had to be executed.
The difference is not talent. The difference is the resistance of reality.
Today, we have tools that replicate what Piranesi once did by hand, only faster and more accessible. The difference is that drawing was understood as vision, while rendering is now often presented as resolution.
This is not a local anomaly. The same dynamic can be observed from London to Dubai, from Milan to New York. The difference lies only in the scale of the market and the tolerance for error. The demand for fast solutions is global, as are the consequences of reducing the process to a visual outcome.
Professional practice follows a different order. Before the first line is drawn, the feasibility of the idea is examined. Dimensions are checked against available formats, materials are selected based on performance rather than appearance, and installation, transport, maintenance, timelines, and budgets are considered. Only when constraints are clear does form begin to make sense.
A large conference table offers a clear example. In a digital model, a monolithic surface appears straightforward. In production, such an element rarely exists as a single piece. The solution requires segmentation and a structure that must be anticipated in advance, and joints become a design task rather than a flaw to be concealed.
If this is not resolved in time, the project enters a sequence of corrections that alter the initial idea and increase cost.
Materials introduce another level of responsibility. A surface that appears homogeneous and refined in a render must withstand impact, heat, moisture, cleaning, and continuous use. At that point, selection is no longer aesthetic but performative. HPL, compact boards, natural veneer, or lacquered MDF are not interchangeable, but systems with distinct constraints in fabrication, detailing, and durability. These differences determine how an object will perform after a year, not just on the first day.
Details that rarely appear in a render, but define the space, require equal precision. Edge ergonomics, power access, cable routing, installation, tolerances, transport, and delivery all shape the project.
When this part of the process is overlooked, corrections shift into execution, where they become the most expensive. Decisions made for the image are then reconsidered under pressure.
Without an understanding of materials, production, and coordination, a render remains a simulation. A simulation carries no responsibility for what happens in space.
Professional education and practice exist to bridge this gap. Not as a formal requirement, but as a method of work. Asking questions before drawing answers. Testing assumptions before turning them into form. Taking responsibility for decisions that must endure.
Interior design is not a sequence of images. It is a system of decisions shaped by constraints. Its quality is measured not by visual persuasiveness, but by the stability of the solution over time.
Rendering comes at the end of the process as confirmation that a solution can exist. When that order is reversed, a project appears complete before it has begun. Reality then demands another answer.
A space that must exist has to resolve everything.
The problem arises when tools are presented as a substitute for education.
MILAN DESIGN WEEK: WHO FORGOT THE WORD ''FAIR''?
It wasn’t always like this.
Mozart, Napoleon, and Marchesa Acerbi have all been issued QR codes, while Maria Theresa holds a press pass. The Empress, however, has cancelled her visit to Milan. You already know why. In this city, things have always been resolved through presence, not announcements. They stood and observed, not because they fail to understand Milan in 2026, but because none of these palaces were ever built or visited in the way they are now being explained. The people at the entrance seemed more serious than court ladies, and the lines, which they briefly mistook for the plebs, appeared more organized, and perhaps even more important than the aristocracy itself.
That’s where the comedy of errors begins.
A fair is a simple thing, and maybe that is precisely the problem. Simple things are the easiest to forget once we bury them under meanings they were never meant to carry. The word fair, whether we call it foire, messe, fiera, bazaar or market, means the same thing: a meeting between seller and buyer, a place where an object comes before a person with a clear purpose: to be chosen and to begin a life beyond that space. It is not a romantic definition, but it is a precise one, and that is exactly why it matters to say it out loud before entering Milan during the week when that simplicity almost disappears.
Milan Design Week is a name that allows this clarity to dissolve. It contains everything, and today that “everything” truly exists: fair, exhibition, installation, architecture, fashion, brand activations and nightlife. That breadth feels open and seductive, but in practice it erases the differences between things that serve entirely different purposes. Once everything is placed under the same elegant parasol, one that conceals more than it protects, everything begins to behave as if it were the same, and what used to be the center becomes just one option among many.
Milan does not ignore this. It remembers. Palazzo Litta is not a space that tolerates superficiality without consequence. Built in the mid-17th century as the residence of Count Bartolomeo Arese, it was a place of presence and encounter, not spectacle. Here, a young Mozart worked and performed during his Milan years, while Napoleon later used the same city as a political platform to establish an order meant to outlast the moment. In other words, people came to Milan with purpose.
Today, in front of those same entrances, conceptual tributes to the fashion industry unfold, often through carefully constructed collaborations that online audiences already understand and accept as a desirable form of life. In front of those same spaces, lines form. Long, precise and disciplined, they wrap around façades and courtyards like a temporary architecture whose only function is to organize waiting. People stand looking at their phones, checking the next location and planning their movement. The space around them becomes a backdrop, and entering stops being a result of interest and becomes a consequence of the fact that everyone is already inside.
That shift reveals how much the underlying logic of this event has changed.
Inside Palazzo Litta, Line Ghotmeh’s installation attempts to return the space to its original function. It does not add a layer, it removes excess, almost biennial in its restraint. Materials are quiet, movement is clear, and light works without needing to impress. In such a space, staying happens naturally. At one point, you come across students from Politecnico di Milano standing next to their work, without the need to explain it or sell it. The scene feels unusual precisely because it shows a relationship between work and space that does not depend on immediate attention.
A few minutes away, in what Milan has long called the Devil’s House, the rules are different. Palazzo Acerbi, tied to Ludovico Acerbi, the aristocrat who continued hosting lavish dinners during the plague while the city was dying, carries a story that still feels exaggerated today, but was entirely real at the time. His behavior was not just excess, it was a complete rupture with reality. Over time, the public turned him into a devil-like figure, a man who did not belong to the same rules as everyone else.
Today, in that same space, you encounter a new version of the same logic. Kelly Wearstler’s installation for H&M home works perfectly on the level of image. The space is precisely styled, the composition controlled, the materials aligned, but the essential action is missing. You cannot sit. I tried. It is not allowed. At that moment, the object stops being an object and becomes scenography, an idea that lasts exactly as long as the frame in which it is captured.
That is why showrooms like Cassina and Flexform, among the key names of Salone del Mobile, feel almost subversive. At Cassina, people sit without needing to justify it, testing proportions, leaning into materials and checking how an object performs in real contact with the body. The need for spectacle is deliberately absent. Sometimes, it is enough just to walk up and down a set of fur-covered stairs.
The Private Life of Objects, through Flexform’s concept, further reinforces this logic by placing objects in a way that asks for time rather than an immediate reaction. Their sofas and other elements don’t rely on first impressions, but prove their value through use.
Baxter, one of the brands redefining contemporary luxury at Milan Design Week in recent years, takes a different approach in the space of Baxter Cinema. It does not erase the existing interior, it continues it. The collection rooted in the seventies does not feel like a reference, but like a natural culmination of a space that was always meant for experience, not observation. You linger the longest around the console with the turntable. Everything leads you there. When I played Daft Punk, the space clicked. Suddenly, you are no longer looking at things, you are part of them.
That is the difference. It does not try to please you. It holds you. And it succeeds.
Jaipur Rugs, in collaboration with Japanese architect Kengo Kuma, translates architecture into textile in a way that does not demand explanation, but time. Here, I am intentionally subjective, because my experience of Jaipur, the “Pink City,” allows me to read the logic of this brand more precisely. There is a move toward the contemporary, but never at the expense of identity. That is why the people behind this story in Milan feel different. Their work appears where it should, from museums to some of the most notable installations across the city, without the need to impose itself, because it is simply visible. Perhaps this is where what design should do is most missing elsewhere — creating a relationship that lasts longer than a single visit
Outside these spaces, the rhythm accelerates again. Phones become the primary navigation tool, QR codes dictate movement, installations follow one another like sequences, and people move from one space to another without stopping. It is as if there is an unspoken agreement not to check whether an object works, as long as it looks like it might, and not to question what is being seen, as long as everyone is looking at the same thing.
Our historical guests from the beginning understand this quickly and step out of the line. Only someone else continues forward instead of the Empress, thanks to a press pass. The system continues to function without interruption. Seamless. Almost too efficient.
In the evening, the scene moves to Bar Basso, one of the iconic spots of Milan Design Week. The lines form again, the same pattern, only now with ice in a glass. At that point, it becomes clear that the problem is not influencers or fashion. They are doing their job precisely and efficiently. The problem is that design has accepted the same rules and begun to measure itself by the same criteria.
While all this is happening, what benefits the most is what comes before and after: the market. During these days, it functions better than ever, not by accident but by design. The rules are simple. The greater the demand, the shorter the stay. The faster you move, the more you spend. Someone might call it a side effect. Here, chance does not feel convincing.
In that context, Salone del Mobile feels like a separate part of the city. It is farther away, it requires time, and you pay to enter, but precisely because of that it retains a clarity that the rest of the week often loses. It is the most precisely structured part of the event, a place where experience is not accidental, but constructed. The object returns to the center. It can be tested, understood or rejected, and brands do what makes them relevant and sustainable. They position themselves through what they are, not how they look.
Within that space, something emerges that the rest of the city has started to imitate: fair-like, almost museum-like moments, tributes to authors, and a clear emphasis on the designers behind the work. If we want younger designers to have greater value and visibility, this is the part of the week that cannot be ignored. Criticizing it without taking responsibility, while pretending we are all part of some abstract event, becomes less a stance and more bad taste.
If the city is a cult of brand, Salone is a cult of authorship. And that is its greatest strength. Here, you know who stands behind the work. And this time, structure did not suffocate content. On the contrary, it allowed it to exist.
In the end, the guests left. The lines dispersed. The music stopped. The lights stayed on a little longer than they should. Someone closes the door. Someone checks if everything is finished. There is no one left in the spaces. Only the objects remain, still there, waiting for someone to actually use them.
MILAN DESIGN WEEK: THIS IS NOT A GUIDE.
Robert Wilson – Mother
photography: ©Lucie Jansch, Salone del Mobile 2025
I don’t like guides.
Not because they aren’t useful, but because they teach you to see through someone else’s eyes. They give you a sense of control while quietly walking you through a pre-lived experience. They tell you where to stop, what to photograph, and when to say something is “good.” And then you arrive in Milan during Salone del Mobile thinking you know where you’re going, when in reality you’re just repeating someone else’s route.
People often say there’s nothing to see in this city except the Duomo di Milano. That’s the laziest sentence ever attached to Milan. The problem isn’t that there’s nothing to see, it’s that most people don’t know where to look. I’ve rarely heard anyone even mention Leonardo’s work. The Last Supper. One of the most famous artworks in the world, something you don’t just “drop by,” but actually plan.
The same thing happens with Design Week.
Milan Design Week is not a single event. It’s not a festival, and it’s definitely not a list of places you can “cover” in three days. It’s a system operating on multiple levels at the same time, and if you don’t separate them in your head, everything starts to look the same. But it isn’t. Salone del Mobile is a fair. Located at Fiera Milano Rho, outside the city center, it’s where design stops being an idea and becomes a product. Brands come to present, sell, and position themselves. This is where you see what will actually be used in the years ahead. If that’s all you see, you’ve been to a fair. Not to Design Week. That’s not about prestige, it’s just logic.
Everything people actually come for happens outside the fair. During these days, the city stops being a city and becomes a stage. Exhibitions, installations, takeovers, spaces shifting their purpose. One moment you’re inside a perfectly produced showcase, the next you walk into a courtyard you didn’t even know existed. And this is where most people lose control, because they try to impose order on something that was never meant to be neat.
Milan Design Week is the collision of system and chaos. And you’re trying to understand it through someone else’s list.
That’s where the real problem starts.
The issue isn’t that you don’t know where to go. The issue is that you don’t know why you’re going.
Milan is not a place for covering ground, it’s a place for making choices. You’re not selecting what exists, you’re selecting what matters to you.
If you’re an architect, look for how something is resolved, not how it looks in a photo.
If you’re a designer, watch what remains of an idea once it becomes a product.
If you’re a student, pay attention to how people think, not just what they show.
If you’re there to take photos, stick to exhibitions. Everything is already set up to look good. Just don’t pretend you’re there for something else. The city is not a backdrop for your content.
The Last Supper isn’t just a reference, it’s a benchmark. A work that doesn’t need to prove anything, something you go to with intention, while these so-called “exclusive dinners” try to replicate importance through guest lists, lighting, and the feeling of being “in.” If you’re going somewhere just because it’s hard to get in, you’ve already made your choice. You’re the audience, not the participant. You didn’t come for design, you came for validation.
Pierre Yves Rochon, Villa Heritage
photography: ©Monica Spezia, Salone del Mobile 2025
Pierre Yves Rochon, Villa Heritage
photography: ©Monica Spezia, Salone del Mobile 2025
If you need to know which metro to take, which train gets you to Fiera Milano Rho, or how to optimize your route, that already exists. There are countless guides that do it better. This isn’t that story. What no guide will give you is how to manage your attention.
If it’s your first time, go to the fair early to understand how the system works without the noise. Then go into the city, but don’t try to cover everything. Brera, Tortona District and similar areas aren’t a checklist, they’re a direction. The real moments will happen in between.
The biggest mistake is trying to give every moment a purpose. Milan during these days is not efficient. It’s an experiment. It’s meant to be overwhelming, just to see what you do with it.
At some point, you stop chasing and start observing. That’s when it begins to make sense. Everything before that is just movement.
Most people will read this and still make the same mistake.
And that’s fine. Just don’t pretend it was something more.
Milan won’t teach you what to do. It will show you how you think.
And for most people, that’s far more uncomfortable than they expected.
Robert Wilson – Mother
photography: ©Lucie Jansch, Salone del Mobile 2025
Don't Expect An Architect To Save The World
There is a mistake people keep making when they talk about architecture. When the city becomes too loud, homes become too difficult to live in and everyday life begins to feel like survival, everyone suddenly looks to the architect as if they were the last remaining voice of reason. As if an architect should walk in, look at the problem, draw a few good lines and say: “There. Fixed.”
No.
Don’t expect an architect to save the world.
Not because we do not want to, but because the world does not behave like a project. It is not a floor plan. It has no façade you can repaint and call the problem solved. The world is made up of small habits, bad choices, speed and exhaustion. Its cracks become most visible precisely where we try hardest to hide them, in the spaces where we live.
And then we ask architecture for a miracle. We want the “wow”. We want the trend. We want an aesthetic that looks like a screenshot, something that can pass through a filter, be posted, liked, saved and scrolled past. As if a space exists primarily to become content.
That is where my protest begins.
Against beauty without purpose. Against interiors that are merely backgrounds. Against spaces that perform meaning. Against design as costume rather than character.
That is why my work does not begin with an image saved from Pinterest. It begins with far more ordinary questions. How does someone enter the apartment? Where do they drop their keys when they come home tired? Why do they keep walking into the same corner of the table? Why are they switching on three lamps when none of them gives them the light they actually need? Why does a room feel calm in a render and demand constant adjustment in real life?
Because space is not simply what we look at.
It also shapes the way we breathe. Walls can make us feel compressed even when we cannot immediately explain why. The wrong light can shift the tone of a day. An aggressive layout can feed tension into everyday life. Too much visual noise can exhaust us before we know how to name what feels wrong.
And then comes the uncomfortable realisation: space changes you even when you think you are the one controlling it.
Don’t expect an architect to save the world. Expect them to understand what space does to a person.
I have always found the idea of the architect as a maker of spectacle slightly strange. I am far more interested in the architect who creates conditions. For an ordinary day. For routines that work. For a home that allows you to return to yourself without explanation, effort or the feeling that you constantly need to perform a version of who you are.
The best spaces, to me, have a certain quietness. That has nothing to do with minimalism, beige or an empty room. A space can be filled with art, books, colour, music, people and things and still know when to recede.
That quietness means someone has thought beyond form. About ritual. Movement. Views. Shadows. Where you put things down when you come home tired and where you sit when you do not feel like talking to anyone.
Sometimes all that philosophy comes down to twenty centimetres on a project. You move a door. You drop the piece that looked perfect on the moodboard. You tell the client they do not need a third type of stone. You reposition a light that nobody will notice in the photographs but somebody will use every evening for the next ten years.
Those are the decisions I care about.
Architecture is not the salvation of the world.
Architecture is a chance to stop the world spilling into your home.
To let the noise of the city end somewhere around the threshold. To slow the pace of the day, if only slightly. To let light enter as a friend rather than a spotlight.
Of course, you can make a space that looks perfect in photographs. Good architecture simply is not tested by a camera.
It is tested on a Tuesday at 4.40pm.
When the day has been bad. When everything has piled up. When you do not quite know what to do with yourself. When you have no desire to be productive, inspiring, interesting or any of the other versions of ourselves we are constantly expected to perform.
That is when you walk into your space and feel: I can simply be here.
That is the point.
Don’t expect an architect to save the world.
Expect them to know when to add and when to stop. To know the difference between an idea and an effect. To say when something is unnecessary, even when it would look good. And to understand that a space is never simply their drawing. It is someone else’s money, someone else’s time and, eventually, someone else’s everyday life.
Because the biggest chaos in a project rarely begins with the colour of a wall. It is not the tile either. It begins much earlier, when there is no clear direction, no realistic sense of time, no clarity about responsibility and no boundaries to the process. Once improvisation stops being the exception and becomes the method, aesthetics can do very little to help.
A good space is not built on improvisation. It comes from clear decisions, a process that makes sense and countless small choices that nobody may ever notice.
Don’t expect me to save the world.
Expect me to make one small, precise part of it less likely to fall apart. A space that is not a lie. A space that makes sense.
I do not ask architecture to save the world.
I ask it to stop lying to it.
If we are going to look for any kind of salvation, perhaps it is not in grand statements. Perhaps it lives in small, precise things. In a space that does not swallow you. In light that does what it is supposed to do. In proportion. In calm.
Everything else is an imitation of life.
NOT ANOTHER WHITE LOTUS
Stefan Miloš
The greatest form of luxury is when good design makes you feel like you can do everything and absolutely nothing.
Words: Danilo Mašković
Photography: Stefan Miloš
“All I care about is that it is clean.”
That is the famous line of many travelers who get lost scrolling through booking platforms or trying to justify whatever some agency arranged. But when I say clean, I do not mean vacuumed or perfumed. I mean clean as in true. When a space tries to be nothing more than what it is, and yet gets everything right. Not sure what I mean? That is fine.
I do not believe in trusted formulas for a perfect vacation. A beach, white sand, turquoise sea – we all know that postcard. But what truly stays with you, what remains in your body after everything else powers down, is this:
Where you slept. Where you woke up. What you saw first. Where you had your morning coffee. And who told you good morning.
Travel begins when you wake up, not when you land.
Most people do not connect interior design with travel. But your senses react even when your brain does not register it. The scent of wood, the feel of the sheets, the way sunlight touches your face – that is what stays. Sometimes as a gentle unease. Sometimes as the reason you come back.
This resort is not by the water because its luxury does not live in turquoise waves.
This view from the top of the hill changes your relationship with the horizon. You are above, but not removed. It shifts the tone of your journey.
From observer, you become participant.
Let me be specific this time. The place is The Pavilions Phuket.
Location makes all the difference.
It is perfectly chosen. Set on one of the highest hills on the island, above Layan Bay, and not on the expected waterfront strip. That changes everything.
You do not hear music from clubs. You hear the wind.
You do not look at the sea to be impressed. You look at it to slow your breath.
White Lotus. No irony.
The stairs leading to the door are not meant to impress.
They are meant to slow you.
Water on both sides and the shadow of the ceiling quiet the chaos you carried with you.
The entrance is the pause between the world and the space.
Architecture here is part of the jungle.
Bamboo, palms, and thick green layers that do not imitate nature – they are nature. Moist air, shadows, and silence feel curated but are not. That is why it all resembles a perfect frame from the series that brought me here.
A place without corporate fingerprints.
You know that moment when a hotel looks the same in Bali and in Mallorca because the designer approached it with copy and paste logic. This is not that.
Privacy is luxury.
Each villa is placed with intention. There are no shared paths. No forced encounters. You have your own micro universe. You do not feel alone, but you feel protected. And that is when you relax.
For a moment I thought maybe I just arrived outside peak season – although Thailand does not really have one. Then I saw lights glowing from other villas at night, and guests gathering for breakfast.
And I enjoyed that quiet game of hide and seek.
The woven divider in the room is not a wall, but a filter.
It separates without blocking.
It letsthe light move freely, and lets you stay in the frame of stillness.
What is inside matters just as much as what is outside.
The furniture does not dominate.
Everything is low, soft, and quiet.
The bed linen is calm.
The light comes from the side, from the shadows, not from the ceiling.
The walls have no ambition to become art, but they are the perfect frame.
You sit differently here.
Light comes from the side. The wall is not white. The tones are olive and quiet. The gold details are real, but not flashy.
In this kind of space, you are not a tourist.
You are a visitor in someone else’s dream.
The interior is not trying to impress you.
It is trying not to disturb you.
And it works.
Everything indoors leans toward the outdoors.
That blurry line between inside and out is the hardest thing to design.
Here, it feels like it was the starting point.
They succeeded.
And I am saving this as a moodboard for future projects.
Still not sure how to paste a feeling into Photoshop, but I will figure it out.
The space with the restaurant and the pool does not beg for pictures.
It teaches you how to observe without needing to claim.
Both nature and architecture know that the first move belongs to the gaze, not the gesture.
Materials that breathe with you.
The floor is warm, not because of the sun, but because of the stone.
The concrete under your feet is not cold because it was treated like a spa. It is simply allowed to breathe.
You feel it, but it does not ask for attention.
The fabrics do not rustle. They are not made for the feed.
But once you sit down, you do not want to get up.
It is not about palm tree aesthetics. It is something deeper – a mural as a backdrop to your absence.
While you have breakfast, it tells you that you are in a place where time does not follow a straight line.
You are here, and you are also elsewhere.
The space sets the mood, not the other way around.
Morning light enters like it is asking permission. At night, lighting does not pretend to be ambient. It simply lowers the pressure.
There are no LED strips. No mood lights. Just light that understands how tired you are.
There are no mirrors with glowing rings. No effects. Just you and water. The shower is not a performance. It is a quiet scene designed for you to forget it exists.
A place where you are alone with yourself – and it is not a struggle.
ALTO, the restaurant, feels like a home where silence lives well.
A navy blue entrance, a central plant, a perfect circle of a rug, a glass table.
It invites you to let go and let your senses lead.
A terrace made for breathing.
Most terraces are made for posing.
This one lets you exhale.
There is no perfect frame.
Only a moment where you blended into the landscape – not the other way around.
Behind the slow conversation and a glass in your hand, there is a man.
He is not decoration. He belongs there.
That is the essence, a design that lets life sneak in without breaking the composition.
The pool does not call you. It just exists. And that is enough.
People as presence, not service.
At The Pavilions Phuket, the staff are not an add-on to the design. They are its continuation. You do not know when they arrived, but everything is already done. You do not say thank you, the gesture is already received.
This is not service. This is the architecture of care. The quiet kind.
The most important kind.
This is the end of the story.
Because if design makes you lie down and go quiet… then architecture has done its work.
An ending without departure.
When you leave a place, you do not remember the colors or the layout. You do not remember how many steps there were. You only remember that there was nothing you wanted to change.
That it felt right. That you could breathe. That you were there.
And maybe, that is the most honest form of design.
COSMØ HOUSE: A DIFFERENT TAKE ON INDUSTRIAL BELGRADE
Stefan Miloš
Commercial Interior | Restaurant
Belgrade, Serbia | 2025
Interior design: Stefan Miloš
Words: Danilo Mašković
3D visualizations: Stefan Miloš
A Belgrade commercial interior takes the American roadside stop as a point of departure, then filters it through an industrial shell, photography and planting.
COSMØ House begins with the idea of a brief pause, somewhere between arrival and moving on. The American roadside stop is a reference point rather than a piece of set design. Instead of leaning on retro cues, the interior works with an anthracite ceiling, metal, rougher surfaces and an open plan that retains something of its industrial setting.
Soft green and terracotta shift the mood away from the expected coldness. Photographs by Stefan Miloš, taken across different journeys, occupy the walls without asking to become the subject of the room. They read more like fragments of other places that have simply found their way into the interior.
Planting changes the rhythm again. A tree at the centre, shrubs and layers of greenery soften the weight of the darker surfaces and create a more informal relationship between inside and out.
The bar remains restrained, with an integrated mirror extending sightlines through the space. Elsewhere, the interior is quiet enough to change through the day, shaped by light, reflection, photography and planting rather than by additional decorative layers.
COSMØ House is at its most interesting when it resists easy categorisation. Industrial structure, urban greenery and personal photography coexist without being pressed into a single, recognisable style.
LUXURY DOESN’T MEAN ANYTHING ANYMORE
What’s worse—that luxury has become a meaningless cliché, or that people no longer recognize it at all?
Today, everything is “luxury”—Italian tiles and Chinese glass. Gold frames and concrete walls. Apartments in prime locations and those in the middle of a cornfield, as long as an agent convinces you it’s “the next big thing.”
Anything can be sold if it’s wrapped in enough empty words.
Luxury. Premium. Exclusive.
On paper, those words sound powerful. In reality, they’re cheap tricks for easy buyers.
And it’s not just here. The world is flooded with overpriced, repackaged things that once had meaning, but today exist just to be bought and displayed.
But who still cares about substance?
Who asks if something has real value—or just a high price tag?
Who dares to say the emperor has no clothes?
No one. Because everyone plays the same game. Safe.
Real estate? On the verge of collapse. Square meters priced beyond their worth.
Design and architecture? Overhyped, reduced to waitlists and meaningless catalogs.
Services? Sold as art, yet in reality, the same beige renders, the same false idea of beauty, the same imitation of something we will never be.
We all know this, yet no one wants to pop the bubble.
And then people wonder why we’re surrounded by soulless spaces.
Why everything looks the same?
Why it feels like we’re living in a furniture showroom graveyard, not in a space that reflects us?
Maybe because it’s time to start calling things by their real names.
Maybe because design isn’t what you see—it’s what you feel.
Because a space isn’t what you buy—it’s what remains after you leave.
Because it’s not about being “Instagram-worthy,” but about not being annoyed by the wrong light in the morning, or instinctively knowing where to set down your glass at night.
Those are the little things.
But those are also the big things.
That’s the difference between an “expensive property” and a truly valuable space.
At Stefan Miloš Studio, we don’t do wedding cakes or cheap pastries.
No pink filters. No empty words.
Design isn’t a luxury. Design is a necessity.
But only if you know what you’re doing.
And I will always be loud about this.
FROM DESERT TO STUDIO
Where were you three years ago?
— In Nice. The evening market, the one that sells lavender in the morning and turns into an open-air restaurant at night. On the table—oysters, rosé wine, good company.
Then, spontaneously, I asked my friends a question. One of those that has no right answer.
“If money wasn’t a factor, what would you do and where would you live?”
Ceca: “Amsterdam, maybe switch to freelance.”
Irena: (long pause, nervous laugh) “I don’t know… I’d have to think about it. Maybe I’d go with Ceca.”
Danilo: “Belgrade, of course.” And as if waiting for the moment, he adds his signature line: “I do not dream of labor.”
And me? I said, “Atelier.”
Not an office, not a workspace, not a “studio.” Something that didn’t have a form yet, but was already there.
And? Did you build it?
— Not right away. Two deserts later, the idea took shape. The first was Wadi Rum in Jordan.
Ah, the classic route – Mediterranean, then Mars?
— I don’t know what’s considered classic. But I do know that Wadi Rum is one of those places that either break you or put you together.
And what did it do to you?
— The silence drowned out the noise in my head. In the desert, you realize how much you actually don’t know. How much you thought you knew. How much you thought you wanted.
That’s why Not A Studio isn’t a studio name. It’s the name of an idea. The studio itself carries my full name (however strange it may sound to some people).
What idea?
— That architecture isn’t a final product but a method. That you don’t just draw buildings or interiors, you design the way people experience space. That the best projects are the ones that don’t even know they’re projects yet.
What does the studio look like?
— Like a desert at sunset. Like the Mediterranean at noon. Warm, golden, sandy, but with a dose of cold stone.
I knew the colors before I even knew what I was creating. I’ve been in this space before, maybe in another life. Zvezdana confirmed it.
Sounds chaotic. Abstract.
— Of course. But chaos has rules, just not the usual ones.
Are you saying this isn’t for everyone?
— I’m saying this is a party with a face-checker at the Door.
And what’s the dress code?
— There isn’t one. But if you think you already have all the answers—you might be in the wrong place.
Last question. This is definitely not a typical introduction, is it?
— This is not a typical anything.
Welcome.