Salone del Mobile opens its first section for design that won’t be mass-produced

For sixty-four editions, this was a trade fair for production furniture. Salone Raritas opened this week at Fiera Milano Rho as something the Salone has not had before: a dedicated section for objects that will not be reproduced at scale. Formafantasma — the Amsterdam-based studio of Simone Farresin and Andrea Trimarchi — designed the space. Annalisa Rosso, the Salone’s Editorial Director and Cultural Events Advisor, curated it.

The new section, subtitled “Curated icons, unique objects, and outsider pieces,” occupies Pavilions 9–11 at the Rho fairgrounds. It is the Salone’s first formal claim on a market that fairs like Design Miami, PAD London, and the BRAFA built carefully over two decades — limited-edition studio work and design antiques where authorship determines price rather than production volume. Those fairs took years to cultivate a collector audience willing to treat a chair the way the art market treats a work on paper. Raritas is attempting to arrive at that same audience in a single fair cycle.

Formafantasma’s spatial design is itself an argument: a circular layout conceived as a lantern, with every structural component engineered to be dismantled and reused at future editions. At a fair whose primary currency has long been spectacle and scale, the commitment to zero material waste is an unusual one.

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The studio’s involvement is not incidental. Farresin and Trimarchi have spent years making the case — in exhibitions at MoMA, the Cooper Hewitt, and Stockholm’s Moderna Museet — that design cannot be separated from its materials, its supply chain, or the politics of both. Their practice sits somewhere between research studio and design office. Bringing them in at an institutional level inside the Salone says something about what the fair wants Raritas to mean beyond this first edition.

Collectible design is the awkward middle of the market. Auction houses handle it only when pieces have crossed into the price tier of Prouvé prototypes or Lalanne bronzes — objects that long ago migrated into fine art sales. Beneath that tier sits a large field of studio-made work in small runs, where value depends on authorship and provenance but the infrastructure for buying and selling remains underdeveloped.

Whether that market travels to a trade fair in Rho is the real question. Design Miami and PAD built their collector bases over years, in dedicated contexts where the buyer is the primary concern; at Salone, the primary audience is the production buyer, the specifier, the contract architect. Raritas runs inside the same building as kitchen systems and bathroom tiles. The two economies do not naturally speak.

The 64th edition of Salone del Mobile runs through April 26, when the fair opens to the general public. Formafantasma are simultaneously presenting Prada Frames — a symposium and exhibition at Santa Maria delle Grazie — running concurrently across the city this week.

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