In a country with one of the world’s richest furniture-making traditions, starting a new design company is no small ambition. FUORI MILANO is choosing to take on that challenge. Founded by Cono Studio and directed by Davide Piersanti, the brand focuses on furniture and home accessories built around the idea that Italian design can be expressive, playful and experimental while remaining deeply connected to the people, materials, and processes behind its production.
For the team, deciding to open a brand begins with the desire to create. As they explain, the project did not emerge as a carefully constructed business strategy, but from something more instinctive: the human impulse to give shape and colour to a personal way of seeing the world.
FUORI MILANO by Cono Studio
The company’s name translates to “Outside Milan” and it offers a clue to the team’s philosophy, which revolves around an exchange between what happens inside and outside. Inside is Milan: its architecture, streets, influences, energy, and constant stimulation. Outside is the world of production: the workshops, the territories, traditions, and skilled hands that transform ideas into objects. Rather than treating creativity and manufacturing as two separate stages, the brand sees them as two worlds that should continuously influence one another.
The brand’s debut collection features 10 pieces conceived as a laboratory for experimenting with colour, form, and material. Chairs Rita and Mario, together with the Bucatino bench, explore soft geometric forms in solid wood, finished in fun matte lacquers. The Cielo mirror, Ufo side table, and Onda tray translate the rigidity of steel into curved profiles. Corallo is a sculptural candle, offering the most poetic interpretation of the series. The collection is completed by 3 posters, rounding it up with a fresh and lighthearted approach.
We spoke with FUORI MILANO’s director Davide Piersanti, chatting about design and identity, where Italian design is at, and the desire to create.
What pushed you as a team to go beyond client consultancy and into launching your own brand?
Davide Piersanti:
“The idea was born primarily from an inner drive, from the need to give space to a primordial instinct to create. At Cono Studio, we work every day across furniture design, branding and art direction for a range of companies, supporting them through strategic thinking and business development. This dual nature — creative and entrepreneurial — was the fundamental ingredient that encouraged me to take a step further and pursue the art direction of an independent project like FUORI MILANO.
Working closely with our clients has allowed us to experience some extraordinary businesses first-hand, immersing ourselves in their industrial and artisanal expertise, production processes and strategic management. Within this melting pot of skills and hands-on experience, an inner drive began to take shape: my desire to develop a personal way of experiencing and looking at furniture design. FUORI MILANO was born from this.”
FUORI MILANO sets out to challenge the sameness and standardisation of contemporary interiors. What do you feel is missing from the way we design, furnish, and live in our homes today?
Davide Piersanti:
“Every environment we inhabit inevitably reflects who we are. If we think about our parents’ or grandparents’ generations, every piece of furniture they bought was intended to accompany them for the rest of their lives, gradually bearing the marks of time. Today, by contrast, we often buy standardised furniture, knowing that it will only be part of a relatively short and temporary chapter of our lives.
Jung wrote that the home is an extension of our soul and our sensibilities. But what kind of soul do we express if our homes all end up looking the same? What does it say about us if our living room is identical to one in Sweden, America or anywhere else in the world?
What is missing is the beauty of diversity, the identity of a personal story. I don’t see this as a question of luxury or of pursuing brand logic at all costs. I’m talking about the ability to fall in love with the things we bring into our homes. I still remember the smell of my grandparents’ homes, where every single object was a piece of their identity. This is precisely what is missing from contemporary interiors today: the freedom to choose living creations, capable of ageing alongside us and transforming everyday spaces into a personal stage.”
How does your relationship with the city of Milan develop into the identity of the brand?
Davide Piersanti:
“Milan is the backdrop and the spark behind this project. It is a city that is constantly changing and moving fast, yet retains a complex soul which, in my experience, is incredibly welcoming and possesses extraordinary creative energy. By its very nature, Milan exists in a close, almost symbiotic relationship with the surrounding manufacturing territory. This connection is directly reflected in the brand’s name, the relationship between the city and what’s outside of it.
That duality is reflected in FUORI MILANO’s design language: simple, elementary forms, rooted in Milanese rationalism, brought to life through fine materials worked slowly and energised by the free use of colour and temporary finishes. Above all, FUORI is an attitude: our way of interpreting Made in Italy through joy, playfulness and fluidity.”
What would you hope the brand changes about the way people understand contemporary Italian design?
Davide Piersanti:
“I hope the brand can bring back to contemporary Italian design its natural inclination towards play, visual provocation and free experimentation, without ever compromising its obsession with the highest standards of craftsmanship. Made in Italy is often perceived as a serious, austere, almost museum-like institution. I would like people to see Italian design once again not as a status symbol to display, but as a joyful and deeply human experience to engage with.
I want to challenge the idea that a piece of furniture must remain pristine and untouchable. True Italian design has a living manufacturing tradition: noble materials are made to be lived with, scratched and even worn by everyday life, because it is precisely these marks that create the memories of a home and forge an emotional connection.
I hope FUORI MILANO serves as a reminder that authentic Italian quality does not lie in industrial standardisation or the rush to produce, but in the luxury of taking one’s time, the value of uncertainty, human error and the courage to continually explore new languages of expression.”
Anna Lazzaron
Anna Lazzaron is a designer, writer, and researcher based in Milan and Barcelona, working across material exploration and speculative practices.
