Hasta La Ideas

Dedicated to emerging designers, Salone Satellite is the area of Milan’s furniture fair where big companies and trend researchers find the fresh stuff.

My Granddaughter’s Cabinet by Lisa Hilland uses typical Swedish materials as a way to hand down the tradition of local design to younger generations. “I have chosen those materials that grow old beautifully,” Lisa told CH, “like reindeer leather and birch, oak and pear wood to let my daughters get to know our heritage.”

The Young Serbian Designers displayed works by Ana Kraš (nice manually knitted lamps and lampshades and Ksilofon stand), Antipod Studio, Jovan Topalovič and Miliana Nicolič.

Jovana Bogdanovi’s polar bear-shaped sugar cube serves to remind us of the animal’s constant disappearance. “Each product has a story,” he told CH. “Otherwise it’s not necessary to have new products.”

The girls at Singapore-based Studio Juju work on playful shapes to create lovely little chairs and stools—as perfect in a children’s playroom as they are on a spaceship.

Craftsmanship, knitting and fashion come together in the Stretch line from Carnevale Studio. American-born designer Jessica Carnevale (after studying in Amsterdam and Rome) came up with this series of chairs which mix materials and inspirations.

Can you fold up a chair and mail it? Cate & Nelson‘s “Hug,” a comfortably wide seat, sets up and breaks down without the use of tools and packs flat.

Morphing and mutation are the keywords for Fehling & Peiz&#8212their latest work “Still Lives” consists of quilted pigs standing in as sofas, while Hockerbank is a series of wooden “siamese” seats molded together.

As any fetishist will tell you, we can have feelings for design objects, just like for our pets. This seems to be the inspiration for the Japanese designer Masakazu Hori, who transforms everyday objects into cute little animals.

Italian designers Filippo Protasoni and Luigi Semeraro joined forces to create La Macchina Sforna Idee, literally “a machine to generate ideas.” At Salone Satellite they proposed a coffee table with a removable top that serve as the perfect base for a laptop.