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At Milan Design Week 2026, Nilufar Gallery will present two parallel design showcases: Nilufar Grand Hotel, a platform to explore hospitality, conceived by founder Nina Yashar, and the design exhibition La Casa Magica, curated by Valentina Ciuffi, to examine the symbolic and ritual dimensions of the domestic sphere. Together, the presentations, on view from April 20 – 26, 2026, will extend Nilufar’s ongoing investigation into design as both a spatial and a cultural practice.
Nilufar Grand Hotel | Nilufar Depot
The immersive curatorial platform is set to transform the Nilufar Depot into a fictional luxury hotel during the design week, where collectible design pieces will become the central ‘residents’ within a constructed narrative environment. The immersive exhibition will reimagine hospitality as a curatorial framework, collapsing the distinction between display and lived experience. Throughout the space, furniture, lighting, textiles and artworks will be arranged as if in a functioning hotel, with new works from Nilufar Edition playing a central role.
It will unfold as a choreographed journey, beginning with an entryway conceived as a check-in threshold, followed by the main atrium, which will function as a social hall. A sequence of ‘signature rooms’ will follow, each conceived as a self-contained environment. Contemporary designers including david/nicolas, alongside Filippo Carandini and Allegra Hicks, will reinterpret the bedroom through distinct material and narrative approaches. The ground floor will also include a dining room centred on Gal Gaon’s Raw Pebble table and a secluded fumoir will display the Disposition seating collection by Derin Beren Yalcin, marking its debut at the Depot.
Upper floors will shift toward a gallery-like format. On the first floor, a meditation room inspired by Japanese onsen interiors will feature tatami flooring and a selection of vintage works by George Nakashima. Other products will include Maximilian Marchesani’s Carbon Cycles lamps and VON PELT Atelier’s Deconstructed Bourgeoisie series, as well as Andrea Mancuso’s Sgraffito table in black Marquinia marble. These will be shown in dialogue with historical pieces by Gabriella Crespi, Franco Albini and Gio Ponti. The show will culminate in a penthouse suite presenting new works by Bethan Laura Wood, including additions to the Meisen line and a custom mirror produced with Venetian glassmakers Barbini, alongside pieces from the Ornate collection. Outdoors, the courtyard will host Mancuso’s Punteggiato collection, conceived as a dehor environment.
“The exhibition extends a long-standing curatorial inquiry, using hospitality as both a new testing ground and an expanded field of design exploration. By engaging with the codes of welcome and domesticity, the exhibition opens a space for experimentation where design is called upon not only to function, but to evoke beauty, meaning and emotional resonance. In this sense, hospitality becomes a fertile terrain for imagining new possibilities—one that allows Nilufar to continue pursuing design as a living, evolving discipline and to establish itself in new contexts while remaining true to its core vision,” Nilufar notes in the official release.
La Casa Magica | Via della Spiga
La Casa Magica shifts focus from hospitality to the home’s symbolic role. “Before becoming comfort or typology, before turning into an exercise in furnishing, the house has been—and still is—a symbolic place: a protective shell against fear and loss, a space where intimacy intertwines with the invisible, with narrative tradition and belief,” Nilufar notes. Curated by Ciuffi, the exhibition at Milan Design Week this year brings together international designers and artists to explore domestic space as a site of belief, ritual and narrative.
The exhibition features works by Anna Zoe Hamm, whose sculptural brooms reframe a domestic tool as an object of protection; Sonia Gorecka, presenting tapestries informed by Slavic traditions; and David Aliperti, whose botanical sculptures position plants as living talismans. Reflective and transformative objects appear in Clara Schweers’ mirror works, while Anita Morvillo’s lamps construct a domestic mythology through light.
Other designers include furniture by Made by Astronauts, alongside works by Kym Ellery, Carandini and AB+AC Architects, who employ materials such as metal and wax as symbolic elements within the home. Craft-based practices are explored through artifacts by Emily Thurman and Pauline Esparon, while themes of purification and protection inform works by Flora Manon, Marc Etienne and Christian Pellizzari. The exhibition also includes ceramic bas-reliefs by Davide Monaldi, referencing Alpine Krampus folklore and positioned around the symbolic hearth.
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