Designers are looking back to look forward. Remember the dressing table? Well, it’s back, with bangs! Italian furniture company Baxter launched an organic-shaped vanity in violet tones, harking back to popular purple which made its way into interiors back then via the psychedelic counterculture. Taking the 1970s vanity into a luxury dimension is Fendi Casa, who released the O’lock Vanity, a gorgeous compact unit dedicated that cleverly makes the boudoir a bombshell again.

Image Credit: Architettura per Fiori presents a series of arch-shaped glasses with modular enamelled ceramic vases.

Image Credit: View of Ronan Bouroullec's Architettura per Fiori and Vetrofuso Spazio glass installations in Milan.

The love affair with mid-century design continues, so there’s little wonder that coloured glass is sliding right back into our DM’s. Yellow and amber glass was especially popular back then, and not just in fashionable eyewear (think the tinted sunglasses sported by celebrities like John Lennon and Elton John). Homes featured stained and patterned glass panels as both windows and room dividers, as well as glass pendant shades aplenty, not to mention Pyrex dishes in the oven and freezer. 

Now, glass has been newly lensed, and is gaining contemporary cachet in a chunky, colourful reincarnation. We’re seeing colour-rich glass incorporated into tabletops for both coffee tables and side tables, and colourful glassware in a fresh palette bringing the buzz to display objets and functional crockery. We absolutely love the Lokum tables by Sabine Marcellis, but really we’re here for any/ all coloured glass

Image Credit: TOOGOOD X NORITAKE COLLECTION DESIGN_Rose collection

Design is looking to nature more than ever, but this time it’s being revived for nature-craving millennials. Anyone on social media for the last couple years would’ve noticed the endless indoor feeds and now and gardening motifs and themes featuring heavily at this year’s fair.

If we’re picking up what designers are putting down, the new work on the block goes beyond designer planters, built-in plant pits and hanging mechanisms. At this year’s fair, leafy moments made their way on to stylish crockery. For Noritake, British designer Faye Toogood (a perennial favourite of ours) launched floral-inspired porcelain plates and vases hand-painted with roses, while ceramics workshop Laboratorio Paravicini released a new series of dishes patterned with hedges and topiaries called Jardin a l’Italienne, ‘the Italian garden’.

Image Credit: Luminaires Series YK100 lamps by Yrjö Kukkapuro for Blond

Milan’s Euroluce lighting fair saw a revivalist release of floor and pendant lamps, designed by the late Finnish designer Yrjö Kukkapuro in 1968. Presented by Sweden’s Blond brand, and titled Luminaire Series YK100, Kukkapuro’s tilting steel and aluminium lamps are the height of retro industrial chic. We also fell in love with the way 6AM studio worked with Venice’s famed murano glass crafters to reinterpret the tradition of the past and make it contemporary.