Eoin Lyons observes emerging furniture fashions in design-obsessed Milan
Milan is a city that takes furniture just as seriously as fashion. Last month, the furniture manufacturers launched their new lines. It's like fashion week, but with tables and chairs. Buyers from every good furniture store in the world come to stock up.
The funny thing is that while fashion folk dress to look like models, furniture buyers dress to look like sofas. It's no joke. Padding, big cloak-y things in one shade only, very buttoned-up. The talk among them is of furniture's growing bond with fashion, not least because fashion conglomerates are buying many of the bigger names. B&B Italia, one of the most influential (think Gucci slick), is now owned by the group that also owns Bulgari, and Campini (think Marc Jacobs quirky) has been bought by Tod's, the leather company.
There are other links. The new colours in furniture are orange and yellow, which are also very much in vogue in the fashion world. It's possible to dress to match your home, shade perfect. B&B Italia showed its new range in Calvin Klein's old shop space - a dark cavern that looks like Darth Vader's lair - on the Via Durini. Here, fabrics also run in tandem with fashion. Sofas and chairs are covered in linen; nearby the clothes in Jil Sander's store are almost exclusively linen. (Irish linen, by the way. Sander spent a lot of time here last summer.)
The other news is that a designer called Patricia Urquiola is hot. Although furniture manufacturers are moving away from having one star designer, she is the big new thing and she designs for B&B.
B&B is really about a complete look, not an individual piece. This look is a mix of the following: the angular shapes and dark woods of French futurist designers of the 1930s such as Jacques Ruhlman; lightness of shape (a Urquiola strength); luxury defined by materials; striped fabrics; quirks such as pop-up headboards (another Urquiola design) and sofas with a V-shape (B&B sofas tend to pose a problem for most Irish homes as they are truly enormous). It's all incredibly beautiful stuff - not over designed or intrusive - and breath-taking when shown together as actual room sets. And it's all incredibly expensive.
If B&B is hot, another company, Cassina - which showed next-door - is lukewarm. Philippe Starck is their new designer and at the moment he is into merging seating with the television. It doesn't work, in my opinion. But Cassina is also reproducing furniture designed in the 1930s by Charlotte Perriand, who was Le Corbusier's right-hand woman and an incredible, but unsung, designer in her own right. Brutal but refined sums up her style.
Armani Casa is next door again, in the space that 15 years ago was the designer's first store. Armani's furniture lacks some of the quality of the other brands. It's beautiful but not quite as beautiful. Furniture makes money for Armani and the store is very dimly lit (unusual for a retail space) - the look is kind of opium den Indochine glamour, but in whispered tones, very soft, very quiet.
In Milan, as in many other cities, the easiest way to see great design is to do a tour of the fashion boutiques. The bigger, cooler ones are always bang up to date and give a snapshot of what's happening. Claudio Silcestrin - who worked on Marie and Joe Donnelly's house in Killiney - designed the Giorgio Armani shop. Another one to look at is Dolce & Gabbana: ornate 19th-century rooms panelled in smoky glass. Behind their store they have opened a bar. It's circular, with black shiny pillars around mirrored walls and prominent self-portrait of the artist and Dolce muse, Ahn Duong.
As much a place to visit as the city's furniture showrooms or the D&G store itself, the bar is a symbol of how inspiration moves from fashion to interiors and back again.
B&B Italia is available at Haus, Temple Bar (01-6795155)