AD CORE DEVISE DESIGNER COLUMN Vol.181
The Milan Design Week report we held recently was viewed by over 1500 people, the highest number of participants for a web-based event to date. This time, it was also held as a Zoom webinar, and we were encouraged by the feedback we received in the survey, with people saying that the photos were beautiful and easy to understand. Some people pointed out that the image quality was poor, but this was because some viewers were using browsers other than Zoom software, so we hope you will enjoy the next event using Zoom software. This Milan report showed us nearly 500 images of 30 events, all of which were photos I took myself and then edited. While organizing these images, I compared the photos I took during Milan Design Week with snapshots I took walking around the city after it ended, and I noticed the abundance of greenery on the upper floors of apartment buildings in Milan. In this column, I will talk about the plants exhibited during the Milan events and the plants in those apartment buildings.
Every year I've walked around Milan for Design Week, navigating the 650 venues within the city with a map (now Google Maps on my smartphone) in hand, pushing myself to the limits like a full marathon, so I never had the luxury of looking up. This time, after Design Week had ended and I was walking through the quiet streets, I happened to look up at the raindrops falling on the road and realized they were coming from the plants on the balconies of the upper floors of apartment buildings. As I started paying attention to what was above me, I realized that there was surprisingly a lot of greenery in downtown Milan, which I had thought had little green space outside of parks. And as I started looking up as I walked around the city, I noticed that there were many beautiful balconies visible from below, and many penthouses with lots of greenery. Speaking of Milan, the "Vertical Forest," a tower apartment building designed by Stefano Boeri and completed in 2014, is famous, but when it was completed, there were doubts about whether plants could grow there given the difficulty of maintenance and Milan's winter environment. However, nearly 10 years later, this Vertical Forest has grown so lush that maintenance can barely keep up.
In April in Milan, the streets are lined with "pioppo" (European poplar), a type of poplar tree, and their fluffy pollen is in the air. Usually, the Salone del Mobile is at the beginning of April, so I don't notice it much, but since it was closer to the end of April, the pollen was so thick that you could see it in the air, and even I, who don't usually suffer from severe hay fever, got a bad case of it in Milan. After Milan Design Week ended, and there was some rain, the pollen subsided, so I had more time to look at the buildings and was able to see the upper floors. In the old town, there are no street trees or gardens facing the road, so perhaps people place plants there to soothe their homes, but I thought that this might only be possible for people with the financial means to live in high-end apartment buildings, especially penthouses or those with large balconies. The wealthy people who live on the upper floors of the city center may be cultivating these plants to enjoy their lives, but it is certain that they provide a good view not only from the street but also for those in the buildings in front of their homes. I couldn't tell what kind of plants they were from so far up, but they brightened up the city, which has many historical and dark buildings.
As I walked down the street, I was reminded of how sparse the plants were in the booths at this year's Milan Salone Fiera and in the showrooms around the city. Plants are an important decorative element in interiors and change with the times, but there were no plants in the showroom of a famous furniture brand that had opened in the city. While plants take up space and make the space feel smaller, the space felt sterile. On the other hand, I felt that there were fewer plants at the Fiera as well. However, high-end brands that seemed to have more resources had plants, using them as part of their interior design. The popularity of tropical plants such as Monstera continues, and there were many plants that take up space as their leaves quickly grow out of the pot, such as ferns and Areca palms. On the other hand, rubber trees and Benjamin figs seem to be a relic of the interior design boom of the 1970s to 90s.
The current interior design trend is eclectic style, where vintage, contemporary, and personal items are layered together, and uniformly trendy interiors are becoming less popular. Is the same true for houseplants? Rather than a collection of plants of the same species, the current trend seems to be to arrange other species skillfully around a central plant. Perhaps a moderately relaxed atmosphere is what creates a relaxing space. The plants in our Roppongi showroom have also grown considerably. The monstera that we had in our Hiroo office has grown so large that it now exceeds our height and is displaying its glossy leaves in the showroom. The ficus has also been repotted and has grown a bit larger. The phalaenopsis orchids placed at the base of the showroom, which we received as a gift when we opened, have also started to bloom after being repotted. Please come and see them in the showroom, along with the plants in the courtyard. (Creative Director, Noboru Seto)
