DeLightFuL: Inside Ciarmoli Queda’s 2017 Salone del Mobile Exhibition

ART & CULTURE · MILAN

Reading time: 10 min

A deep blue corridor, three animal-shaped mirrors and a bronze chair opened the way into ten glass doors, three dining tables built around three cities, and a final room the visitor was invited to rearrange. For the fifty-sixth Salone del Mobile, Ciarmoli Queda built an exhibition called DeLightFuL around the idea that living has no single correct shape, and Matteo Garrone shot a short film to go with it. The pairing was not incidental. It was the studio’s second collaboration with the director in as many years.

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In April 2017, the Milanese design studio Ciarmoli Queda, founded by Simone Ciarmoli and Miguel Queda, staged an exhibition inside the Euroluce pavilions at Fiera Milano Rho titled DeLightFuL, an acronym for Design, Light, Future and Living. It ran for the length of the fifty-sixth Salone del Mobile, from 4 to 9 April 2017, in Pavilion 15 of the Rho fairground, and drew on furniture and lighting supplied by more than thirty Italian and international brands.

The exhibition moved visitors through four distinct spaces, each built to argue something different about how people live now. It began with a narrow blue corridor and ended with a room the visitor was asked to arrange themselves. In between sat a hall built from glass doors and coloured light, and a set of three dining tables standing in for three very different cities. Alongside the physical installation, the studio worked again with the film director Matteo Garrone, who shot a companion short film at a waterfall park south of Rome, using real lighting pieces as its central props.

This is the argument the piece sets out to recover: that DeLightFuL used contrast, colour and the direct comparison of cultures to make a case against a single template for domestic life, and that Ciarmoli Queda arrived at that case from an unusual direction, by way of two decades in fashion rather than a conventional design education.

What the visitor actually walked through

The exhibition opened with a narrow corridor lit and finished in deep electric blue, its walls interrupted by three mirrors cut into animal silhouettes. It was a deliberately disorientating start, closer to a stage entrance than a trade fair stand, and it delivered the visitor to a single, minimalist bronze chair standing alone before the exhibition proper began. The chair worked as a full stop on the corridor’s theatricality: after the colour and the mirrored animals, one plain, cast object, asking to be looked at rather than sat in.

From there the show opened into what the studio called the Hall of Art, a room built around ten glass doors, each opening onto a different interior scene. Coloured lighting swept across the room and shifted from door to door, sometimes drawing a visual line between two adjoining interiors and sometimes setting them starkly apart. The doors were used, in the studio’s words, as gateways that catalyse change: not simply openings but the mechanism by which the room made its argument, since the same trick of light that could show two interiors as continuous could just as easily show them as opposites.

The second space addressed design and time more directly, through three full dining table settings, each built to the aesthetic of a different city: Las Vegas, Shanghai and the Aegean. The three did not read as a single, blended global style. They stood far enough apart in material and mood to make the differences between them the point, while the presence of a shared object, the dining table, made the case that eating together is a constant underneath the variation. It is a neat piece of exhibition design logic: use the one form every culture shares to measure how differently every culture dresses it.

The exhibition closed in a room fitted with white furniture in a range of shapes and profiles, none matching any other. Visitors were invited to arrange the pieces into their own seating configuration before watching a short video and leaving through curtains finished in silver. The room’s argument was stated as plainly as an exhibition gets: there cannot be a single, one-size-fits-all approach to design, and the clearest way to prove it was to hand the decision to the visitor and let them build their own layout.

Who built it: two decades in fashion before a chair was ever drawn

Simone Ciarmoli and Miguel Queda founded Ciarmoli Queda Studio in Milan in 2009, but neither arrived at interior design by a conventional route. Ciarmoli spent close to twenty years working with Giorgio Armani, and Queda’s background runs through Gianfranco Ferré and Valentino, where his focus on fabrics, materials and finishes was built. That fashion training shows up directly in how the studio talks about its own work: not as styles applied to rooms, but as materials, treatments and colour handled with the same precision a couture house applies to cloth.

The studio describes its approach as neo deco, a term it is careful to define narrowly. It does not refer to a specific decade or revival style, but to what the studio calls a more conscious approach to design, one aimed at objects and interiors that last, built with what it calls the right contents and freshness. DeLightFuL‘s own framing, that contemporary living merges essential human need with refined material and warm finish, reads as the same idea applied at exhibition scale rather than in a single room.

By 2017 the studio’s project list ran from residential commissions on the Côte d’Azur to a concept store for Agnona in London and the interiors of a 106.5 metre superyacht, work that shares a consistent instinct for treating a large, complex brief as a single considered material palette rather than a checklist of finishes. A residence in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat and a yacht cabin sit a long way from an exhibition hall in Rho, but the underlying method is the same one visible in DeLightFuL: choose a small number of materials, treat colour and light as structural rather than decorative, and let the space argue its point through contrast rather than explanation.

That method is also why the studio’s own language keeps returning to permanence. Designing something with “the right contents and freshness” is a fashion-house way of describing longevity, closer to how a couture atelier talks about a cut that will not date than to how a furniture showroom usually talks about a finish. It is a useful lens for reading DeLightFuL itself: an exhibition that closed after six days, built almost entirely from ideas about what endures.

A second Salone, a second short film

DeLightFuL was not Ciarmoli Queda’s first Salone del Mobile exhibition, and it was not the studio’s first collaboration with Matteo Garrone either. A year earlier, for the fifty-fifth Salone del Mobile, running 12 to 17 April 2016, the studio staged Before Design: Classic in an 80 square metre pavilion built around a small theatre modelled on Andrea Palladio’s Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza, surrounded by eight themed rooms exploring how classical furniture holds its relevance over time. Garrone made a short film for that exhibition too, following child-like figures he described as custodians of taste, recovering precious furnishings from a post-apocalyptic landscape as a way of dramatising the idea that real quality outlasts its era.

DeLightFuL repeated the pairing on a larger stage, and the choice of director is worth pausing on. Garrone is not a design-world regular brought in for a one-off; by 2017 he was one of Italian cinema’s most internationally recognised directors, the maker of Gomorrah and, that same year, the film that would become Dogman. His involvement with Ciarmoli Queda across two consecutive Salone editions reads less like a marketing booking and more like an ongoing collaboration between a design studio and a filmmaker who shared its interest in material culture and, specifically, in light.

The scale of the two exhibitions also tells its own story about how quickly the collaboration grew. Before Design: Classic filled 80 square metres and eight rooms around a single theatrical centrepiece. DeLightFuL expanded that structure into four larger, more distinct spaces spread across a full Euroluce pavilion, with a correspondingly larger cast of participating brands. Whatever was working about the first exhibition, the fair gave the studio more room to do it again a year later.

The film nobody searching for the exhibition finds first

The detail that does not surface easily in general coverage of DeLightFuL is what Garrone’s short film for it actually was, and it is worth setting out in full, because it changes how the exhibition’s own title reads.

Garrone shot the film outdoors, not on a set, at the Parco delle Cascate di Chia, a waterfall park in Lazio, with the cinematographer Nicolaj Bruel. The footage moved between warm and cool light to track the story’s progression, and the film’s premise put real lighting objects into a natural setting as if they were native to it: an Atollo table lamp, designed by Vico Magistretti in 1977 and awarded the Compasso d’Oro in 1979, appears in gold on a desk surrounded by greenery, while a Lys floor lamp, designed by Daniele Ruzza and Silvana Angeletti for Oluce and shaped around an illuminated head like an inverted bluebell, stands amid the waterfalls and foliage. Ciarmoli Queda Studio edited the finished film themselves.

Read against that, the exhibition’s own acronym stops being a marketing device and starts reading as a genuine thesis. Design, Light, Future, Living was not simply a name found for four keywords that happened to spell something pronounceable. The film argued that a forty-year-old Compasso d’Oro-winning lamp belongs as naturally beside a waterfall as beside a desk, which is exactly the same argument the physical exhibition made with its three dining tables and its rearrangeable final room: that good design travels across contexts because the human needs underneath it do not change, even when everything around them does.

What it gives the reader now

DeLightFuL sat inside the Euroluce pavilions during Euroluce’s own twentieth edition, the lighting-focused half of the Salone that runs in odd years, which explains why light was doing so much of the exhibition’s structural work rather than sitting in a supporting role. The furniture and lighting on show came from more than thirty brands, among them Artemide, Kartell, Flos, Poltrona Frau, Martinelli Luce, Alias, Poliform and Flexform, whose contribution to the exhibition included a Groundpiece sofa reworked with an armrest finished in a manta ray-effect material and an A.B.C.D. armchair retrimmed in eco-fur with fluorescent orange metal tubing, both treated, in the brand’s own account, as proof that a single design could be reinterpreted for entirely different ways of living.

That is the practical value in returning to a 2017 exhibition now. DeLightFuL is a compact, complete case study in how to build an argument through sequence rather than statement: a corridor that disorients before a chair that resolves, a hall of doors that can show either connection or contrast depending only on the colour of the light, three tables that use one shared ritual to measure real cultural difference, and a final room that hands the actual decision to the person standing in it. Every stage of the exhibition made the same point in a different material, which is a more disciplined structure than most exhibition design manages, then or now.

It also helps explain why the exhibition sat inside Euroluce specifically, rather than in the furniture halls proper. Euroluce runs only in odd years, as the lighting half of the Salone calendar, which meant DeLightFuL opened at a moment when light itself was the fair’s headline subject rather than a supporting detail. The Hall of Art’s shifting colour and the final room’s silver curtain exit were not simply atmospheric flourishes borrowed for effect. They were the exhibition using its host event’s own subject, light, as the actual mechanism of its argument, in the same way the dining tables used food and the corridor used disorientation.

Final thoughts

It would be easy to file DeLightFuL as a well-dressed trade fair stand, four pretty rooms built to show off thirty brands’ worth of product in one place. What that reading misses is the discipline underneath it. Every space, the corridor, the hall of doors, the three tables and the final room, ran the same experiment through a different material: put a fixed human need next to a variable cultural expression and see what stays constant. A chair is still a chair whether it sits in Las Vegas, Shanghai or beside the Aegean. Light can make two rooms look like variations on a theme or total opposites, using nothing but colour.

Garrone’s film for the exhibition, shot beside real waterfalls rather than on a studio set, made the same case in a different medium, putting a Compasso d’Oro-winning lamp into a landscape it was never designed for and letting it belong there anyway. Seen together, the exhibition and the film form a single, considered argument carried out twice: about design, about light, and about the constants that survive nine years, two directors and one very long walk through a Milanese exhibition hall.