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How Indian Designers, Craftspeople, And Studios Are Making Their Mark

For 64 years, events like Salone del Mobile have been the event around which the global design calendar turns. Every April, Milan becomes the most important city on earth for anyone who cares about how objects are made and how rooms feel. Brands spend months preparing for this week. Careers are made or meaningfully shifted by a single show. A spot at Nilufar, a room at Alcova, a pairing by IKEA — these are not small things.

At the 2026 edition, something shifted in the tally of who held those spots. Indian designers, studios, and craft ateliers were present not at the fringes but at the fair's most competitive addresses: Nilufar Depot, Alcova's Baggio Military Hospital, the Pinacoteca di Brera, Spazio Maiocchi. The presence was not symbolic. The work was serious, diverse, and — in more than one case — the result of years of material investigation that simply happened to reach its most visible platform this April.

This is an attempt to document that moment properly: who was there, what they made, why it matters, and what it tells us about where Indian design sits right now in the global conversation.

The Context: Why 2026 Felt Different

India's visibility at Milan has been building steadily. Jaipur Rugs has been a fixture at Salone since 2019. Klove Studio has shown internationally. Vikram Goyal first appeared at Nilufar — becoming the first Indian designer to be represented by Nina Yashar — with his inaugural international exhibition at PAD London in 2023, followed by a solo presentation with The Future Perfect during Art Basel Miami Beach. But 2026 was the first year in which the Indian presence felt systemic rather than singular.

There were also structural reasons why this edition of Salone was particularly receptive to collectible and craft-forward work. The 64th edition introduced Salone Raritas — the fair's first dedicated platform for collectible design, limited editions, antiques, and high-end craftsmanship, curated by Annalisa Rosso and given spatial form by Formafantasma. For decades, collectible design had been Salone's unofficial shadow programme, living in the galleries and palazzos of Fuorisalone rather than inside the fairgrounds. Raritas brought it into the hall, with a roster that included Nilufar, among others. The signal to the market was clear: this is now central, not peripheral.

It was the right moment for Indian collectible designers to be taken seriously at the highest level. They were.

Vikram Goyal is Delhi-based and defines his studio practice around a model he calls the Karkhana — a traditional workshop structure in which designers, architects, engineers, and artisans work under the same roof. His signature techniques include repoussé (hammering designs into metal from the reverse side), pietra dura, and hollowed joinery. The materials are predominantly brass and bronze, and the work sits at the intersection of sculpture and furniture in a way that has historically been more legible to international collectible design galleries than to traditional commercial channels.

For the 2026 edition, Goyal returned to Nilufar Depot — he was the first Indian designer signed by Nina Yashar, a distinction that carries weight in a gallery that has been, as one description puts it, the most influential talent scout in design for nearly fifty years. This year, Yashar transformed the Depot at Viale Vincenzo Lancetti into a fictional hotel called the Nilufar Grand Hotel, with signature rooms designed by a global roster that included French-Lebanese studio David/Nicolas and British designer Bethan Laura Wood. Goyal's bronze-cast sculptural side tables — forms that evoke the gnarled structure of a tree trunk — and his wall mirrors that appear to move like flowing vines were positioned in the Penthouse suite, anchoring a space that juxtaposed his work with pieces by Audrey Large and vintage Venetian glass.

But Goyal also had a second presence in Milan this year, at Alcova, through the Shakti Design Residency. NYC-based architect and designer Rodolfo Agrella spent time at Goyal's Delhi studio as part of the residency's second cohort, and the resulting piece — Natyam — is a pendant screen composed of five sheets of hammered brass. It can be hung as art or deployed as a room divider. That Goyal's studio served as an atelier for a Shakti resident while Goyal himself was simultaneously showing at Nilufar is a useful measure of the reach the practice now has.

The first, at Alcova's Baggio Military Hospital, was through the Shakti Design Residency. Daniel Garber — co-founder of Studio Noff — spent his residency in collaboration with Klove, working with glassblowing craftspeople in Uttar Pradesh. The result is a three-piece collection called Reh: a table lamp, a pendant light, and a floor lamp, all in amber-tinted glass with a warmth that comes directly from the glassmaking methods indigenous to the region. The collection is described as being based on India's earliest glassmaking methods, and the forms — stacked vessel shapes threaded on a luminous brass spine, with draped metalwork detailing — carry that material history visibly.

The second presence was at the Pinacoteca di Brera, as part of the Jusoor Design Collections Exhibition — a Saudi-focused design event that brought five Saudi designers into collaboration with international studios. Klove was the only Indian firm in the exhibition. The collaboration paired Prateek Jain and Gautam Seth with Saudi designers Muotaz Abbas and Aseel Alamoudi, introducing them to handblown glassmaking through the studio's north India craftspeople network. The resulting work is less a product launch than an act of cultural transmission: Indian glass technique as a creative medium for designers from a completely different design tradition.

That Klove now operates simultaneously as a maker, a collaborator, and a craft-access gateway is a significant evolution in what the studio represents. Jain and Seth began, by their own account, without knowing what would work. The 2026 Milan programme suggests they now know exactly what they are doing.

The Shakti Design Residency: India as Creative Infrastructure

The single most structurally significant Indian design presence at Milan Design Week 2026 was not a single designer or a single object. It was the Shakti Design Residency — a programme conceived by Shalini Misra, a London, New Delhi, and New York-based interior designer and philanthropist, that places international designers in Indian master workshops for extended residencies.

The second cohort of Shakti residents presented at Alcova's Baggio Military Hospital (a site described as an abandoned military hospital — the specificity of the Rationalist architecture at this Fuorisalone location is part of Alcova's curation logic). Six designers, six pairings with Indian ateliers, six finished works. The exhibition design was handled by Duyi Han — a Chinese designer who had been a first-year Shakti resident in 2024, and whose appointment as scenographer this year reflects the residency's stated commitment to continuing creative relationships after the initial production period ends.

The six pairings were:

Rodolfo Agrella (NYC-based architect and designer) with Vikram Goyal Studio — producing Natyam, a pendant screen in five sheets of hammered brass.

Victoire de Brantes (VSB_Atelier, Paris — a resident of the Ateliers de Paris) with Jaipur Rugs — producing a hybrid object in hand-spun wool and bamboo silk, executed using hand-knotted rug technique, that functions as both a rug and a piece of furniture. De Brantes's practice is rooted in local contexts and materials; the Jaipur collaboration resulted in something that uses the vocabulary of textile while behaving like a landscape.

Daniel Garber (Studio Noff) with Klove Studio — producing the Reh lighting collection in Uttar Pradesh glass.

Zofia Ursic (Sobolewska Ursic) with Frozen Music — producing a work in stone, adding to the material scope of an already wide-ranging cohort.

Tadeáš Podracký (artist and designer, Czechia — faculty at the Academy of Art, Architecture and Design in Prague, holder of an MA from the Design Academy Eindhoven) with Heirloom Naga Centre — producing the Prorustai table, whose curved forms reference the morung, the traditional communal longhouse of Naga tribes, and whose grooves carry direct formal citations from Naga woodcarving traditions. Podracký has described the making process as encountering a faster but deeply authentic mode of production, one that privileges direct engagement with material over refinement.

Maria Tyakina (product and furniture designer, Rotterdam) also with Heirloom Naga Centre — producing a cane bench and stool using steam-bent thick cane poles, an ancient Nagaland technique, in collaboration with master artisan Ajaj Gour. Tyakina preserved the cane in its natural state — knots, colour variations, and the char marks from the bending process included. The result is a structural skeleton that appears to flow continuously.

What makes Shakti significant beyond the individual works is the argument it makes about Indian craft. Misra has been explicit that the programme is not interested in perpetuating the idea that Indian design has to look a certain way to be legible to a global audience. What it is interested in is treating Indian craft knowledge — from glassblowing in Uttar Pradesh to cane-bending in Nagaland — as a creative system that international designers can enter, be changed by, and work within as equals rather than as commissioners.

The fact that the second cohort drew applications from 53 countries suggests the framing is landing.

Jaipur Rugs: Two Stories Running in Parallel

Jaipur Rugs, founded in 1978 and now working with over 40,000 artisans across 7,000 looms in Rajasthan (with women comprising 85% of the weaving network), has been showing at Milan since 2019. The 2026 edition gave the brand two distinct narratives.

The first was the FACES collection with Japanese architect Kengo Kuma — a 16-piece series of handwoven rugs in wool and regenerated natural fibre viscose that translate the architectural facades of Kuma's buildings into textile. The collection is not a literal reproduction of building elevations. Kuma has described it as capturing the sensory memory of architecture: not the exact geometry, but the atmosphere that a facade creates — the way light touches a layered surface, the depth of stacked material planes, the subtle textures you perceive almost unconsciously. Works in the collection reference specific Kuma buildings, including the Suntory Museum of Art in Tokyo (interpreted in the rug titled Sukima, after the concept of space between forms that allows light and air to flow) and the Museum of Kanayama Castle Ruin. The collection was presented at three venues: the Salone del Mobile fairgrounds in Hall 22, the brand's showroom on Via Marco Minghetti, and — most atmospherically — the Crespi Bonsai Museum outside Milan, which hosted a Milan Design Week presentation for the first time. The Japanese gardens and bonsai collection at Crespi provided exactly the cross-cultural resonance that a collaboration between a Japanese architect and an Indian craft house deserves.

The second Jaipur Rugs story at Milan ran through the Shakti Residency: Victoire de Brantes's rug-furniture hybrid, made with Jaipur artisans and shown at Alcova. The two projects share an institution but represent entirely different registers of practice — one a major design-architecture collaboration for commercial release, the other a residency-led craft investigation. The fact that Jaipur Rugs is operating at both levels simultaneously is an indication of the range the brand now covers.

Mehek Malhotra: The Maximalist in Spazio Maiocchi

The most mainstream-visible Indian presence at Milan Design Week 2026 was also the one that operated most explicitly in the register of cultural representation. IKEA's 2026 Milan exhibition, titled Food for Thought and held at Spazio Maiocchi in the Porta Venezia district, paired five designers with five chefs to create five rooms exploring how design and food shape everyday life. The exhibition also previewed three pieces from the IKEA PS 2026 collection.

Dehradun-based Mehek Malhotra — a visual artist, graphic designer, and former Canva India creative lead known for maximalist interiors that inject personal identity into domestic space — was paired with Italian chef Maurizio Tentella. Their room, titled Eat With Your Mouth Open, treated the shared meal as one of the most loaded social rituals in domestic life. Malhotra's approach layered mismatched chairs, Indian textiles, and primary-colour tableware to create a deliberately informal dining space, one that encourages gathering and lingering rather than formality. Wallpaper described the pairing as: India meets Italy through traditional objects and textiles.

The characterisation of Malhotra's Milan appearance as a pop-up showcasing her own home misses the brief. This was a commissioned, concept-driven room within a global IKEA exhibition, alongside designers from London, Spain, and New York. The Indian content was specific and intentional — but it was deployed in service of IKEA's thesis about design and domesticity, not as a showcase of Malhotra's personal aesthetic. The distinction matters: it is the difference between a designer being hired for their cultural perspective as a design tool and being there to represent their work. Malhotra was doing both, which is its own form of recognition.

Heirloom Naga and the Cane That Carried Memory

Heirloom Naga Centre, founded by Jesmina Zeliang, occupies a specific position in India's craft landscape: a Nagaland-based organisation that works with cane, bamboo, and wood traditions that are inseparable from the social and material culture of the region. The Centre provided the atelier context for both Tadeáš Podracký and Maria Tyakina in the Shakti Residency's second cohort.

Podracký's Prorustai table took the morung — the communal longhouse that serves as a civic and cultural centre for Naga tribes — as its formal inspiration. The curved shapes that support the slab, and the grooves in the wooden surface, are formal citations from Naga traditions. Podracký intentionally left the cane in its natural state, with charred marks from steam bending preserved rather than smoothed. He has described the result as something in ongoing transformation rather than a fixed construction — which is also an accurate description of what happens when a Czech artist with a Design Academy Eindhoven MA spends time working with craftspeople in one of India's most distinctive cultural geographies.

Tyakina's bench and stool, made with master artisan Ajaj Gour, used steam-bent thick cane poles to create continuous structural skeletons. Like Podracký, she preserved every material trace of the process. The resulting pieces celebrate the making, not just the made object.

Both works were among the most discussed at Alcova this year, precisely because they refused the typical residency logic of imposing a designer's existing language onto a new craft context. The Nagaland material knowledge is visible in the objects, not consumed by them.

What This Adds Up To

There is a version of India's Milan 2026 presence that writes itself as a feel-good cultural narrative: Indian design has arrived. That version is not wrong, but it is incomplete, and it slightly misses what was actually interesting about this year.

What was actually interesting is that the Indian presence in Milan in 2026 was heterogeneous in a way that previous years were not. There was collectible sculpture in bronze at Nilufar (Vikram Goyal), collectible stone furniture debuting at the same gallery (Rooshad Shroff), craft-based lighting at Alcova through a residency model (Klove Studio via Daniel Garber), an architecture-to-textile collaboration at Salone's commercial fair (Jaipur Rugs with Kengo Kuma), a residency-led textile-furniture hybrid at Alcova (Jaipur Rugs with Victoire de Brantes), woodcarving and cane work from Nagaland in a curated Alcova presentation (Heirloom Naga Centre with two European designers), and a maximalist Indian interior designer given a room in IKEA's most high-profile Fuorisalone activation of recent years.

These are not all the same thing. They represent different relationships between Indian craft knowledge and international design practice. Goyal's work is made in India, carries Indian technique, and is sold through an international gallery as collectible design. The Shakti Residency pieces are made in India using Indian craft processes, but initiated by international designers who came to learn. The IKEA collaboration is a commission given to an Indian designer to represent an Indian domestic perspective. The Jaipur Rugs FACES collection is international design translated into Indian craft and sold globally.

All of these models are legitimate. What 2026 demonstrated is that India now has enough depth and enough variety that multiple models can run simultaneously, at competitive addresses, in the same week. That is the actual shift.

There is also a longer infrastructure argument here, which the Shakti Residency makes more explicitly than anything else. Shalini Misra's programme is not just connecting international designers with Indian ateliers. It is making the argument that Indian craft knowledge is a creative system of equivalent intellectual weight to any European design tradition — one that changes the people who enter it, rather than simply supplying them with materials or techniques. The fact that Duyi Han, a first-year resident in 2024, was appointed scenographer for the second cohort's Alcova presentation is a small but pointed demonstration of that philosophy in action.

Milan has always been where the design world decides what to take seriously. In 2026, it took India seriously — not in one place, but in many places, and not in one register, but in several. The room has changed.

Beyond & More India is the sole Indian representative for over 30 family-owned European furniture and design brands. beyondnmore.com

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