Butter-like blocks of foam frame Secolo + Tableau collaboration at Milan design week
Danish studio Tableau has unveiled its collaboration with Italian brand Secolo, which includes an undulating sofa and furniture with blind-drawn flowers, at the Soft Matters installation during Milan design week.
Located inside a building that has been decorated with playful flower illustrations, Soft Matters marks the first time Secolo has collaborated with an external designer.
Tableau, which has a design gallery as well as a flower store in Copenhagen, brought its signature creative touch to the collaboration. It remade Secolo's Pingu Side Table using blind drawing – when you cover your eyes and draw shapes, in this case flowers, from memory.
"I've been doing blind drawings of flowers for 10 years, so it's like a meditation for me," Tableau founder Julius Værnes Iversen told Dezeen.
For the Secolo collaboration, he asked the brand's founders to collaborate with him, creating the flower drawings for the pieces together.
"They are all applied directly to the piece before lacquering the furniture," Iversen explained. "So it's very intuitive and unique, because each piece gets its own pattern of flowers in different colours."
Tableau also designed the Trace sofa, which has an undulating shape, for Secolo as a "conversation starter," Iversen said.
"It's quite an impactful design – it's very large and made for people to be able to interact and have conversations," he said. "And it's quite comfortable for such a designed furniture piece."
The sofa takes centre stage at the Soft Matters installation, which features industrial foam walls that resemble giant blocks of butter.
"The scenography is based on the foam material from the factory," Iversen said.
"A lot of the pieces by Secolo are produced in foam, and all of the blocks that you see in here were brought before being used in production, so these will go back to the facility and be used to make furniture afterwards."
The installation also uses cut-offs, pieces that have been left over from production and will go on to be recycled, as a backdrop for the furniture.
Tableau usually shows at 3 Days of Design, the Copenhagen design week, though it has taken part in Milan design week before.
But this is the studio's largest Milan show to date. To Iversen, the benefit of Milan design week is that you get more eyes on the products here than in Copenhagen.
"I think the benefits of Milan compared to Copenhagen are that it's more comprehensive and larger scale in Milan, whereas Copenhagen is a little bit smaller and more unique," he said.
"[In Milan] there's the opportunity of showing for a larger audience and a larger audience in terms of PR," he continued.
"Obviously, 3 Days of Design is growing quite a lot, but I still think the spaces here are bigger, the audience is bigger, the attendance is bigger – also from the public."
As well as the two pieces from Tableau, Secolo also unveiled its new Plumea armchair, which features an upholstered seat and backrest that were designed to resemble pillows.
Also in Milan, fashion brand Issey Miyake is showing waste paper that has been transformed into marbled furniture. To celebrate the week, we spoke to Milanese designers to get their best tips for local spots and hidden gems.
The photography is by Frank Stelitano.
Soft Matters takes place from 20 to 26 April 2026 at Via Giuseppe Giacosa 35, 20127 Milan, Italy. See Dezeen Events Guide for more architecture and design events around the world.
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