Salone del Mobile Milano 2019 - Day 1

Welcome to the coverage of the 2019 Milan Furniture Fair. We start today, officially the day before the fair opens, to tell you a bit about what we saw on our first day out and about. We also attended the press opening of the Moooi exhibition and spoke exclusively to Marcel Wanders.

We started the day in the Brera design district of Milan viewing the fashion windows and visiting showrooms. Observing the fashion colours in advance of going to the fairgrounds has become a bit of a routine for Mike, as the colours you see here influence the interior colour palette. Coral pink was popular, along with a vibrant teal and canary yellow. More disturbingly from an interiors perspective was the prominence of fluorescent colours - pink, green, orange and yellow.

Most of Brera was still in setup mode, so after calling into a few showrooms it was off to the press preview of the Moooi installation. This year Moooi moved into Brera for Design Week. While the Milan display was smaller than previous years, Moooi also launched their collection simultaneously in showrooms across the world. In his opening speech Marcel Wanders described his new sofa BFF, Best Friend Forever, a soft quilted modular sofa loosely based on the Chesterfield style.

Designers Kranen and Gille then spoke about The Party Wall Lamps, a series of five ceramic faces with captivating personalities. While these were launched in New York last December there was a new chandelier version on display. As a special surprise, the chandeliers began to 'sing' thanks to small embedded microphones in the fitting.

A final highlight of the exhibition was a new fabric called Tokyo Blue inspired by the extinct Indigo Macaque monkey. Tokyo Blue is a denim from Japan with a higher durability and resistance to fading. Moooi is also using the dying technique on leathers. The monkey himself appears in a wall covering made from denim with intricate stitching.