The seventh edition of Alcova - an international platform for contemporary design - will open to the public April 15-21 in the unprecedented setting of two iconic villas in the Milan metropolitan area, Villa Borsani and Villa Bagatti Valsecchi. Now a must-see destination of Milan Design Week, Alcova presents projects by designers, galleries, companies, institutions and schools in dialogue with extraordinary works of architecture - an approach that has been the same for years, but each year produces new and surprising results.

The rooms of the villas, with a strong architectural character, respectively modernist and Lombard Baroque, will host the selection of Alcova projects, generating surprising juxtapositions. The doors of the two mansions, for the first time, will open to welcome the general public, inviting them to question themselves on a theme always central to Alcova: that of living, which this year will unfold in its com- plexity through two “domestic” contexts.

The research strands are renewed, intertwining: technological and sustainable materials and production processes, contemporary craft, experimental aesthetics, sociological, political and global issues. Alcova invites the public into an almost surreal microcosm; a historically relevant context in which to gather to imagine the future of design through installations, performances and collective moments.