London interior designers and stylists Studio Toogood  invited food and design collective Arabeschi di Latte  to serve black food to guests at midnight dinners in a darkened apartment in Milan last week. Waitresses at the Underkitchen dinners wore perspex headpieces designed by Faye Toogood with milliner Zara Gorman and food included cheese served on coal, burned artichokes, bread dyed with squid ink and eggs cooked in black tea.

Titled Natura Morta, the Italian term for “still life”, the installation at Erastudio Apartment Gallery presented Toogood’s second furniture collection, Assemblage 2 . The outsized still lifes showcased in this provocative exhibition, which are composed from an abstract collection of hand-made and found objects, celebrate the darker side of the natural world. By replacing the delicate sycamore, brass and Portland stone found in Toogood’s first collection with more elemental materials, Assemblage 2 seeks to reinterpret its clean geometric forms made using leather, sand-cast aluminium, melted pewter, bronze, wax and resin.

The exceptionally detailed insects, created by an American artisan gave birth to ‘Johnny B. Butterfly’, a small limited series of pendants. Butterflies and dragonflies dance around an over-sized light bulb, wrapped with a frosted strip of telfon to create a whimsical and light-hearted fixture.

Dutch Designer Mieke Meijer’s ’Newspaperwood’ produced in collaboration with vij5 is a reversal of traditional production processes – instead of production going from wood to paper, it goes the other way around. the material is made from surplus amounts of newspapers that are layeredin such a way that they produce the effect of wood grain or rings of a tree, giving the product the aesthetic of real wood. it can also be cut, milled, sanded and can be treated like almost any other type of wood. 

Japanese architect Shigeru Ban has collaborated with french lifestyle brand Hermes to create a paper house pavilion on show at Milan Furniture Fair 2011. located inside Hermès Maison, the structure follows in the architectural style of Ban, constructed from paper.

A wooden frame is in place which acts as the support for paper tubes which are placed vertically to form the walls of the structure. paper is then woven horizontally across through these ‘columns’ to close off the space, offering more privacy. The house is open on each end, allowing visitors to walk through the structure with ease The pavilion stands as an exhibition space for the first contemporary furniture collections designed for Hermès with pieces by Enzo Mari, Antonio Citterio, Denis Montel and Eric Benqué, along with new home furnishing fabrics.these furniture objects are arranged within to create a real domestic space.

At Milan Furniture Fair 2011,  Fendi presents the first Italian exhibition of their project, ‘Fatto a Mano for the Future’, featuring the performances of london-based designer Rowan Mersh, Italian artist Nicola Guerraz, Italian sculptor Sandro Del Pistoia, and Fendi artisan Federica Antonelli.

The live design series invites artists and designers to join a fendi craftsman in creating sculptural objects using discarded materials from the fendi production process, as a conceptual illustration of the interactions that take place between designers and artists, production and tradition, and creators and materials.