Tom Dixon Checks In: The Mua Mua Hotel at Mulino Estate
There is a long tradition of designers staging domestic vignettes at Milan Design Week — the aspirational living room, the fantasy kitchen, the bedroom that exists only as a backdrop for a new lamp. Tom Dixon has never been particularly interested in fantasy. At the Mulino Estate, a 1929 complex designed by Chiodi and Gio Ponti for the Sordelli family, Dixon and his Design Research Studio have done something more committed than a vignette: they’ve built an actual hotel. The objects on view here are not waiting to be photographed. They are waiting to be slept on, sat in, switched off at two in the morning by a guest who paid for the room. ...