Deep roots, new directions: Design Continuum of Villeroy & Boch and Ideal Standard at Fuorisalone
At Design Continuum, innovation is staged as a condition that evolves through it. An exhibition that draws on two brands that now operate within the same group – Villeroy & Boch and Ideal Standard – whose histories make this logic concrete more than rhetorical.
Milan Design Week offers something most industry contexts don’t: the space to slow down and make an argument. Villeroy & Boch and Ideal Standard use that space deliberately, and, with their exhibition Design Continuum, held at their showroom in Foro Buonaparte 70, from April 21 to 26, 2026, the two brands bring their combined heritage – spanning nearly three centuries of ceramic manufacturing and design collaboration – into conversation with the questions shaping the field today.
For both companies, innovation has never been a clean break. It accumulates in manufacturing processes, in material research, in the decision to commission a designer rather than default to convention – and Design Continuum makes that accumulation visible. The exhibition does not present prototypes or speculative scenarios, it presents products already in production, each one the result of a specific technological choice applied to a specific design problem. Additive manufacturing, reactive glazing, precision surface engineering, gesture-based interfaces: these are tools being deployed with a clear understanding of what they are for.
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Villeroy & Boch was founded in 1748, when François Boch began manufacturing ceramic tableware in the village of Audun-le-Tiche in Lorraine. The company as it exists today was formally constituted on April 14, 1836, when the Boch family merged with Nicolas Villeroy’s enterprise – a union of two distinct ceramic traditions that produced one of Europe’s most enduring industrial names. From the outset, the company’s development was inseparable from its material, and every expansion was in scale, every shift in production method was also a shift in what ceramics could do and mean.
Ideal Standard has a different genealogy: established in America and arriving in Europe in the early twentieth century, it concentrated purely on bathrooms from the 1970s onward, building its reputation through manufacturing precision and a sustained investment in design collaboration – beginning in 1954, when Gio Ponti created ceramic sanitary ware for the brand. That decision – to treat design as a structural commitment rather than a finishing layer – shaped everything that followed.
Design Continuum uses a sequence of product narratives to make this visible – moving from matter to form, from perception to interaction. The starting point is ceramic, approached as a system open to transformation, and the multiple adaptations of it, developed in new, innovative and technological products. Antao 3D, created by Design Studio KASCHKASCH for Villeroy & Boch, introduces additive manufacturing into this context.
Produced using 100% internally recycled ceramic, the basin is built layer by layer, allowing the process to remain legible on the surface, creating a result that resists the conventional idea of perfection associated with industrial ceramics, and where slight irregularities, density shifts and visible stratifications become part of the object’s identity. 3D printing here, is used to redefine how ceramics can be formed rather than replicate existing typologies more efficiently, insisting on waste that can be reintegrated, and how variation can be controlled without being eliminated. Technology, suggesting a circular approach where production residue becomes the starting point for new fabrication cycles, acts directly on the logic of the material.
From material, the narrative shifts to form and its capacity to persist. With the Atelier Collections, Ideal Standard repositions innovation as refinement rather than invention. Since 2018, Ideal Standard has worked with Italian design studio Palomba Serafini Associati (PS+A), on collections such as Conca, Tipo-Z and La Dolce Vita, designed by Ludovica Serafini and Roberto Palomba, operate through calibrated proportions, clear geometries and a controlled visual language. Conca pays tribute to Paolo Tilche‘s original design, while Tipo-Z reinterprets Gio Ponti’s Zeta basin – forms that have already demonstrated their durability, brought forward through updated materials and production processes rather than replaced. The premise is that some forms have already solved something.
“Simplicity is complexity solved, as Constantin Brâncuși once said. Every design choice matters – we don’t aim to surprise, but to go deep into function and the beauty of what is essential,” says Roberto Palomba.
The work, then, is not to invent again but to understand what made them work and carry that intelligence forward. In contrast to a design landscape increasingly driven by algorithmic generation and rapid iteration, these projects propose a different temporal model, where innovation as the maintenance of coherence over time, adjusting and not replacing, and, even if the technological dimension is less explicit, is still present, residing in the ability of contemporary production systems to sustain precision, consistency and scalability while preserving the integrity of established forms.
A third shift occurs at the level of surface, where design moves from object to interface. With Artis Sense, designed by Christian Haas for Villeroy & Boch with a colour concept by Gesa Hansen, the basin becomes a site of sensory modulation. Ribbed textures structure the surface, catching and diffusing light in a way that alters the perception of colour and depth, lying in an effect that goes beyond purely visibility, and the relief introduces a tactile dimension that engages the body in use. Technologies in mould-making and finishing now allow for fine-grained textures to be controlled with increasing precision and reproduced at scale – the surface is an active component that shapes spatial and sensory experience.
Interaction becomes the next field: the Vea fittings collection, also by Christian Haas for Villeroy & Boch, translates technological development into gesture, putting at its core is ViPush technology, where water flow activated by pressing and adjusted by turning a single control element, reducing the interface to a minimal sequence – press, turn, release – while increasing the level of control available to the user. The design draws on the typology of perfume bottles, introducing a familiar reference reinterpreted through precise engineering, and, through faceting surfaces, enhances the interaction, reflecting light differently as the hand engages with the object, reinforcing the perception of movement and feedback. The tap functions here as a micro-interface, where mechanical innovation, ergonomics and sensory cues converge in the everyday act of using water, reframed as a deliberate action, structured by technology but experienced through the body.
The final passage returns to material from a different angle. Antao Earth, again by Design Studio KASCHKASCH for Villeroy & Boch, explores how industrial production can accommodate variability. A reactive glaze technology produces subtle differences in color and texture across each basin – finishes such as Terra, Sand and Smoke carry surface effects generated by chemical reactions during firing. Unlike conventional glazing processes that aim for uniformity, this approach allows controlled unpredictability, and, here, technological innovation lies in calibrating that variability. Defining parameters within which difference can occur without compromising performance or quality, each piece is slightly distinct while remaining the outcome of a highly managed process. The collection defines a hybrid condition where craft and industry intersect – and where the surface carries a sense of material authenticity, and yet is entirely the result of engineering decisions made upstream.
Across these five product narratives, a consistent logic emerges: innovation is not isolated in a single breakthrough – it is distributed across multiple layers, such as raw material sourcing, production techniques, surface engineering, interaction design and so on. And each project addresses a specific aspect of this system, while all contribute to a broader redefinition of what the bathroom can be and do.
At the Design Continuum exhibition, ultimately, we can argue on how technology is positioned in relation to design, and the expression is that nowadays is not as an external driver applied from outside, but an intrinsic component that shapes its possibilities from within – operating alongside heritage, material knowledge and intuition, not in place of them. Progress, in this model, is cumulative, not disruptive; the objects on display do not introduce new features in isolation – they articulate new relationships between processes and outcomes, between users and systems, between consistency and variation, acting as a present condition already in development.
Design Continuum is on view at the Villeroy & Boch and Ideal Standard showroom, Foro Buonaparte 70, Milan, from April 21 to 26, 2026. Opening hours vary across the week: 10:00-19:00 on April 21, 23, 24 and 25; 10:00-17:00 on April 22; and 10:00-14:00 on the final day.
About the author
Ludovica Proietti, journalist, design historian and curator, teaches in universities and curates events, always exploring projects with fresh, unconventional perspectives.
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