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Milan Design Week returns later this month, once again transforming the city into a sprawling map of historic palazzos and hidden courtyards reactivated by Fuorisalone events. As always, the scale is difficult to grasp, with more than 300,000 visitors passing through the furniture fair alone, while thousands more circulate between districts like Brera, 5VIE, Porta Venezia and Isola. Luckily, we've already put together an agenda for Milan Design Week 2026, mapping out the key exhibitions and must-see events, but beyond that overview, a more specific thread deserves a spotlight.
This year carries a particular resonance for designers from the Middle East and North Africa. As explored in our recent look at navigating Milan Design Week from the region, participation is not always straightforward. Shaped by visa processes, distance and shifting regional conditions, for many, Milan represents not just visibility, but arrival—a space that, at times, has felt logistically or politically out of reach. For those able to navigate the all too common reality of shifting regional contexts, presence reads differently: more hard-won. There is a quiet insistence at play, and one that reveals itself through moments of nuance and storytelling across the city. What follows is a focused selection of the Middle Eastern designers at Milan Design Week 2026, alongside the exhibitions that bring this perspective into view.
Isola Design Festival — Isola District
Celebrating a decade since its debut, Isola Design Festival returns with TEN: The Evolving Now, marking its evolution from a grassroots initiative into a Milan Design Week mainstay. Within this framework, this year a strong presence of Middle East and North African designers unfolds.
At Isola Design Gallery, Lebanese designer Roseline Jabbour presents the Loop Bench, a sculptural maroon steel piece that translates subtle behavioural gestures into a fluid seating form. As part of the Rising Talents exhibition, UAE-based studios introduce a playful register, including Mr Johns Goods’ toy-like Woaw lighting and Gagan Randhawa’s stacked crystal compositions for JORANI, while Design Matter’s Hala Mareehk rug draws on the UAE’s Mars mission through a tactile composition of wool and recycled yarn.
Egyptian designers Malak Elzeftawy and Rana Ayman present the modular Zahra Stool, while Nermin Habib’s Olla Forms reimagines traditional clay vessels as tools for environmental response. The intersection of heritage and future thinking continues within the Ithra exhibition, where Doha-based multidisciplinary designer Stephen Amoyo explores expatriate transience through a board game format, Abdulla Buhijji presents an incense-based Open Apothecary, and Ola Znad’s Walls of Remembrance reflects on Baghdad’s fragmented urban fabric.
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THE LINE — 7+1 Acts of Survival, Porta Venezia
Located on Via San Giovanni alla Paglia in Porta Venezia, THE LINE is a new platform co-conceived by Riccardo Robustini of Dubai-based Breath Design. Its inaugural exhibition, 7+1 Acts of Survival, sets the tone, inviting each participating designer to work with a 50 × 50 × 50 cm block of black African stone formed over 2.5 billion years. From this shared starting point, the works diverge into sculptural and architectural propositions that respond to the concept of survival.
Standout contributions include Lebanese architect Bernard Khoury’s If Only Françoise Knew, a low, monolithic stone table marked by subtle irregularities, reflecting on the theme of survival through chance and disruption, while Palestinian architects Elias and Yousef Anastas (AAU Anastas) approach it as a collective condition through Maurizio, a precisely interlocking stone table where structure depends entirely on balance. This unmissable debut is the first chapter of an ongoing research trajectory spanning memory and the archaeology of the future.
Lina Ghotmeh — Metamorphosis in Motion, Palazzo Litta
Installed in the main courtyard of Palazzo Litta, a historic Baroque palace in Milan’s city centre, as the central gesture of MoscaPartners Variations 2026, Metamorphosis in Motion by Lebanese architect Lina Ghotmeh reactivates the space as both passage and destination. The project transforms the courtyard into what Ghotmeh describes as “a playful labyrinth” that underlines the structure and history of the palazzo while introducing “a contemporary layer that offers a silent pause within the intensity of the Design Week experience.”
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Drawing from her philosophy of the “Archaeology of the Future,” Ghotmeh treats the site as a living archive. Curved, labyrinthine forms are set against the rigid symmetry of the architecture, choreographing a fluid path that reshapes how the space is read and inhabited. “Metamorphosis emerges through use, transforming space, memory, and experience into a single, dynamic lived narrative,” Ghotmeh adds.
Saudi Design Showcase — Jusoor Design Collections, Pinacoteca di Brera
Another debut can be found within the Pinacoteca di Brera. A new cross-cultural initiative called Jusoor Design Collections brings together five Saudi designers in collaboration with international studios. The title Jusoor, which is Arabic for “bridges”, frames the project’s intent, which curator Samer Yamani describes as “a search for a shared horizon… a place we call the middle ground… where the act of crossing ends, and the grace of meeting begins.” This middle ground takes form through collaborations spanning Riyadh, New Delhi, Kathmandu, and Barcelona, resulting in limited-edition works.
Highlights include a monumental glass and metal lamp by Klove Studio and Muotaz Abbas, hybrid sandstone and steel lighting by Aseel Alamoudi, the CORA Collection of sculptural seating by Abeer AlRabiah and Albandari Sulaiman, derived from handwoven carpets, and a spiral metal bookshelf by Saud Alsaleh with Lagranja Design. Across the collection, function gives way to narrative and material presence, described by Yamani as “a laboratory of human connection… where craft is no longer a relic of the past, but one of the most luminous and human forms of innovation.”
Urjowan Alsharif Interiors at L’Appartamento by Artemest
For 2026, Artemest returns to the grand rooms of Palazzo Donizetti with the fourth edition of L’Appartamento, aptly named, A Celebration of Italian Grandeur, which is informed by the historic trip known as the Grand Tour, with each designer taking inspiration from a different city to design a separate room in the space.
Among the international names taking over the palazzo’s ornate interiors, Urjowan Alsharif Interiors is one to have firmly on your radar. For 2026, Alsharif Interiors will design a bedroom reflecting Florence’s legacy of proportion and culture. Founded by Saudi interior architect Urjowan Alsharif, the studio operates between Dubai and Riyadh, building a reputation for curated, high-end interiors across the Gulf. Alsharif's spaces feel thoughtful and lived-in, she pits contemporary design against heritage elements, working closely with artisans around the world.
At L’Appartamento, that approach plays out inside one of Milan’s most historic settings. Alongside studios like Charlap Hyman & Herrero and Rockwell Group, Alsharif brings a distinctly regional perspective into a global conversation, showing how Middle Eastern designers are leading the future of interiors on an international stage.
L’Appartamento by Artemest takes place at Palazzo Donizetti, located on Via Gaetano Donizetti, 48, in Milan. The exhibition runs from April 21 to 26, open daily from 10am to 6pm, with a press preview on April 20 from 10am to 5pm.
A Tribute to Beirut at Casa Giusti
Titled “Li Beirut: Between Shadow and Light”, this exhibition offers a quietly immersive reflection on the shifting realities of Beirut in the Middle East and its domestic landscapes. Envisioned by Lebanese designer Mark Farhat Giusti, it reimagines the domestic interior as a spatial narrative shaped by architecture and atmosphere, and is presented at Casa Giusti, the home of MARK / GIUSTI Creative Hub in Milan’s Porta Venezia district.
Bringing together a group of Beirut-based creatives, the installation unfolds through layered contributions. Architect Rami Lazkani introduces a site-specific intervention of arches and windows that gesture towards continuity and historic identity, while designer Youssef El Hadi’s handcrafted sculptural furniture is integrated with archival paintings by his grandmother, Celia El Hadi, embedding the space with a sense of inherited personal history. Developed collaboratively, the project carries particular weight in the current geopolitical climate, positioning Lebanese identity as something both preserved and continually evolving.
Rania Hamed Presents Ommi as Part of Gallotti & Radice’s Tales in Glass Exhibition
Interior architect Rania Hamed, based between Dubai and Montreal, presents Ommi at Milan Design Week 2026 as part of the Tales in Glass exhibition. The exhibition marks 70 years of Gallotti & Radice and is staged at Palazzo Meli Lupi di Soragna in Milan from April 20 to 25, 2026.
Gallotti & Radice was among the first companies in Italy to promote glass as a primary material in furniture design and with this exhibition it aims to give global designers an opportunity to present their interpretations of glass. Hamed’s piece is a side table made from cast transparent wired glass, bronze-coloured glass, and polished stainless steel. It explores the grid as a structural and visual system, drawing on historical uses of grids in architecture to mediate light, privacy, and airflow. The project developed from earlier experiments with glass blocks and focuses on how light interacts with layered transparency.
Ommi is presented alongside works by five international designers, contributing to a section focused on future design directions through material research and cross-cultural perspectives.
Fadi Yachoui — La Volupté: Unfolding, Galleria Rossana Orlandi
Titled La Volupté: Unfolding, Lebanese designer Fadi Yachoui’s latest collection continues a body of work shaped by memory, rupture, and transformation. Developed from The Cut, a performative act first staged in Beirut, the collection brings together a series of chairs and benches that read as fragments released from a larger whole, each carrying a sense of origin while asserting its own autonomy. The collection, which will be exhibited at Galleria Rossana Orlandi, presents pieces hand-sculpted in resin and woven in natural rattan, reworking Lebanese wicker-weaving traditions through soft, anthropomorphic forms. Structure and tactility sit in quiet tension, with elements that incline towards one another without fully meeting, suggesting proximity rather than resolution.
Georges Mohasseb — Cactus Collection, Nilufar Depot
Georges Mohasseb’s Cactus Collection reworks the familiar desert form into a series of tables and consoles defined by vertical, column-like structures that lean closer to architecture than object. Presented within the Nilufar Grand Hotel at Nilufar Depot, rather than literal interpretation, the cactus becomes a framework through which ideas of resilience are translated into proportion, texture, and presence. Composed from marble and limestone particles bound with resin and cast in 3D-printed molds, the pieces carry surfaces that oscillate between erosion and fabrication. These forms take on a quiet monumentality within Nilufar’s scenographic setting where the collection aptly reads as a series of collectible objects with a near-museological quality, suspended between natural reference and constructed form.
Etereo — Citywide, from 5VIE to Nilufar
It’s impossible to miss Etereo during this year’s Milan Design Week, mainly because the Dubai- and Milan-based collective will present a city-wide programme spanning four locations, from the 5VIE district to Nilufar Depot. Rather than a single installation, the project operates as a sequence of interconnected chapters, with each collection reflecting a distinct approach to craft and composition.
At The Pool NYC in 5VIE, the nomadic gallery known for its curated collectible showcases, Mo.du.lo reinterprets 1970s glass-block design through modular, light-driven structures. At Nilufar Depot, Nina Yashar’s landmark exhibition space in the Farini district, Imago positions seating as sculptural objects through a convergence of ceramic, burl wood, and bronze. At Casa Conte, the Milanese showroom dedicated to contemporary collectible design, Ophelia translates floral references into architectural dining forms, balancing quartzite surfaces with steel structures, while Medusa, presented at Alimonti Milano’s gallery space, treats onyx as draped matter, introducing movement into stone.
David/Nicolas — La Boiserie and The Bedroom, 5VIE and Nilufar Depot
Beirut-born duo David/Nicolas also presents a multi-site programme including their studio in the 5VIE district and Nilufar Depot. At the centre is La Boiserie, unveiled within their Milan studio, a modular reinterpretation of classical wood panelling that integrates storage, furniture, and ornament into a continuous spatial system. Alongside this, Scapula, developed with Ceccotti Collezioni, translates the anatomy of the shoulder blade into a sculptural armchair defined by its poised, graphic silhouette. At Nilufar, the duo presents a full interior installation dubbed The Bedroom, where embroidered wall coverings and custom carpets dissolve the boundaries between surface and object.
Richard Yasmine — Vessels of the Intangible
With Vessels of the Intangible, Lebanese designer Richard Yasmine presents a collection that shifts focus away from function towards perception. Structured around the five senses, the works translate sight, sound, scent, taste, and touch into sculptural light objects that operate as abstracted thresholds rather than literal forms. Crafted through a range of artisanal techniques including metalwork, leather, blown glass, and embroidery, each piece is conceived as a self-contained object charged with symbolic intensity. Light is treated as an internal force, emerging from within each form, while the collection unfolds within what Yasmine describes as a Neo Ritual Baroque. Yasmine's showcase will appear at 5VIE – QoT: Qualia of Things, from
20–26 April 2026, between 10:30–20:00.
Pots & Pines — StackSpire
Dubai- and Tehran-based practice Pots & Pines presents StackSpire, a modular planter system that invites visitors to become part of the design, building, shifting, and reshaping its form over time. Founded by architect-turned-landscape designer Salar Ayazkhou, the studio works at the intersection of planting, craft, and spatial composition, often translating natural growth into structured forms.
Built from stackable cylindrical elements of varying proportions and colours, StackSpire allows for continuous rearrangement, forming vertical compositions that evolve through movement and use. Rather than a fixed design, the work operates as an open framework with shared authorship, balancing planted greenery with architectural stacking. Form is never fully resolved but shaped through interaction. It’s the kind of project that captures what’s most enjoyable about Milan Design Week, a break from the usual look-but-don’t-touch approach in favour of something far more hands-on.
