Some reports from this year’s I Saloni noted a shift towards the more glamorous, fashion-first end of the market – and away from the furniture itself. Tim Hudson, the UK representative for Italian furniture mechanism suppliers CIAR and Nisi Group, also came away from the exhibition baffled by the silence around the substance. In his words, here’s what the world’s biggest furniture show didn’t talk about – and why that means opportunity …
Simone, commercial director at Nisi and a long-standing figure in the Italian furniture industry, said it to me on the first morning.
A friend of his, a farmer from rural Italy, had called asking for tickets. He’d heard there were a lot of pretty women at Salone.
Salone, Simone said, isn’t a trade fair any more. It’s a destination. Security on the stand entrances, long queues outside the known brands, every nationality on the planet apparently in the same building at the same time – the farmer, I suspect, would not have been disappointed.
The Financial Times calls it the design world’s answer to Davos. Monocle puts it on their global events planner alongside the Venice Biennale and Cannes. The statistics – 1,900 exhibitors, 32 countries, 169,000m2 – are available elsewhere. But what they don’t capture is what it actually feels like to be inside it.
And yet. Walk the halls long enough and a different story emerges.
Before I walked a single stand, I tried to plan my route. The Salone exhibitor directory runs to 1,900 entries. I searched for motion furniture. Then recliners. Then mechanisms. Nothing. There is no category. No filter. No taxonomy for functional seating of any kind. The show doesn’t recognise it exists. That, it turned out, was the first finding.
I spent time on the floor with Château d’Ax, Himolla, Eco Italiano, Innova, Polipol and more.
Motion furniture is actually everywhere at Salone. Recliners. Swivel chairs with independent function. Manual mechanisms engineered with genuine ingenuity. One major German manufacturer showed a sofa whose end section rotates through 90°, transforming it into a chaise for evening use. No motor. No control box. Elegant problem-solving.
But here is what almost nobody said – why any of it matters.
The controls are hidden. Deliberately. The buttons are engineered into the upholstery, invisible to the eye. The mechanism is present. The narrative is absent.
I asked the same question at every stand: “What do you tell customers about the functionality? What’s the story behind the movement?”
The answers were variations on silence.
“It’s Italian design.”
“The retailer decides that.”
“We were the first supplier into Milan’s first seven-star hotel.”
At one stand, a large banner advertised zero gravity. The demonstrator couldn’t explain what zero gravity meant for the person sitting in it.
The most candid conversation came from a senior export director at one of Europe’s largest upholstery manufacturers. His assessment of the current market was direct – no adventure, no innovation. Retailers are reducing floor staff. Training is being cut. The industry, in his words, is in “risk-off mode”.
It is a rational response to a suppressed market. It is also a gap that someone will eventually fill.
Hidden functionality is not, it turns out, a confession of embarrassment. At the premium end – Roche Bobois and above – the mechanism is a whispered value-add for the discerning buyer. Motion as exclusivity, not explanation.
But the majority of the UK market does not sit at that price point. It sits in the space between functional necessity and aspirational desire. And that space has no story attached to it.
Himolla, the German motion specialist, a significant supplier to UK retail, told me directly that wellness positioning is the retailer’s decision. They won’t be providing the narrative. Neither will Château d’Ax. Neither will anyone else exhibiting at the world’s biggest furniture show.
The President of Lombardy, speaking at the Salone inauguration, described the fair as an infrastructure capable of connecting vision and production, creativity and the market.
Nineteen years in the industry, and I’ve never seen a bigger story go untold.
The retailers and designers who pick up that story – who decide that the chair which moves deserves a reason to move – will have the space entirely to themselves. That is what Milan didn’t say.
