Lake Como Design Festival returns for its eighth edition from 12 to 20 September 2026, and this year it steps outside its usual footprint. Alongside the familiar exhibitions and installations around Como and its lake, the festival moves for the first time into a set of new venues in Lecco. The theme, Border, runs through every part of the programme, and the organisers treat it less as a dividing line and more as a place where things meet: relationships form, tensions surface, and ideas change shape.

That idea shows up in a concrete way. By reaching into Lecco, the festival pushes past the boundary it has kept to since it started. It also launches a new strand of exhibitions built with the region’s higher education institutions: the University of Insubria, the Como Conservatory, the Aldo Galli Academy of Como/IED, and the Politecnico di Milano’s Lecco campus. The goal is to pull younger audiences into design, architecture, and art through work they can actually engage with, and to turn the festival into a place where long-term collaborations can start, not just a one-off cultural event.

Discover Lake Como Design Festival 2025 

Villa del Grumello: Future in the Past

Villa del Grumello and its park open to the public again, this time hosting Future in the Past, an exhibition that looks at how memory feeds design. Rather than treating archives as storage for old material, the show presents them as active spaces that can still produce something new.

The line-up brings together several distinct voices. Artist Lupo Borgonovo shows Disegno Nomade, large drawings based on buckles once used by nomadic peoples across Eurasia. Designer Nicolò Spinelli teams up with Simonetto, the Meda woodworking atelier, on an architectural intervention by Elisa Ossino built from gradient eucalyptus wood panelling. Etel comes back to the festival with a show on Lina Bo Bardi‘s furniture work in Brazil, including her Carrinho de Chá and Cadeira de Balanço. Annarita Aversa of Architetti Artigiani Anonimi presents Proporzione Mediterranea, curated by Giustini Stagetti Gallery and rooted in the vaulted houses of the Amalfi Coast.

Lake Como Design Festival

Como & Lecco, September 12-20, 2026

Seven editions so far
For professional and general public
Size: 20+ site-specific locations, 650+ designers and galleries involved 100,000+ visitors

The Carla Badiali Archive shows drawings from Badiali’s work with Hubert de Givenchy and Pierre Balmain, and Eredi Marelli brings a 1948 bar cabinet by Paolo Buffa engraved with motifs drawn from Andrea Appiani’s lost decorative cycle for Milan’s Royal Palace. Francesca Brambilla curates 1in16 – A Border Divided, a Story Shared, where each artist works on a single sheet of AnimaGrigia® paper that only takes its final form once it’s divided; the resulting notebooks go on sale during the festival, with proceeds funding Wonderlake Como’s schools programme for 2026–2027.

In the park surrounding the villa, Nella Natura: Stories of Those Who Chose Another Life opens as an outdoor exhibition. Curated by Paola Manfredi with photographs by Selene Magnolia Gatti, it follows six people who live on the edge between the city and the wild, offering a quiet counterpoint to the villa’s archive-focused programme.

Discover EDIT Napoli 2025 

Villa Saporiti: Contemporary Design Selection

For the first time, the Contemporary Design Selection moves to Villa Saporiti, a late-18th-century neoclassical building known for its rare elliptical salon and lakeside facade. Curated for the fourth year running by Giovanna Massoni and directed by festival coordinator Francesca Prandelli, the show gathers more than fifty independent designers, studios, artisans, and galleries from around thirty countries, all responding to the Border theme through an open call launched in January.

Massoni frames the selection as a space where different geographies and practices sit side by side rather than compete, drawing on ideas from Gilles Clément, Zygmunt Bauman, Tomás Maldonado, and Bruno Latour to describe borders as places of exchange rather than separation. The work on show moves across several interpretations of that idea: pieces built from waste materials or biomaterials sit next to reflections on craft and manufacturing; some designers hybridise materials and media, others build objects meant to shift function depending on how they’re used. Several projects sit at the edge between authored and participatory design, between individual and collective practice, and between human and non-human ways of making.

 

Nomade: Fine Comune

Inside the former Church of Santa Caterina, Nomade presents Fine Comune, developed with Ultrapresent Studio. The show plays on the Latin root of the word border, con-finis, which points to a shared edge rather than a wall. Concrete and metal sculptures by Luca Monterastelli sit in the side aisle, while the main space, laid out with a soft floor and central seating, brings together Acerbis’s Free System modular seating, collectible pieces from Movimento Gallery, and handcrafted rugs by cc-tapis.

Alberto Granata: Border People

At the Chiostro di Sant’Abbondio, photographer Alberto Granata shows sculpture photography under the title Gente di Confine, curated by Eugenio Bitetti. His images sit deliberately between the material and the metaphysical, giving stone figures a sense of life that pulls them out of pure history.

Ico Parisi Design Archive

The Archivio Design Ico Parisi marks its return with Ico Parisi e Giuliano Collina: Arte Condivisa, tracing the collaboration between the two artists from the 1970s through to 1995, when La Ruota, the gallery founded by Ico and Luisa Parisi, closed. The show includes ceramic pieces the pair made together in 1971 and material connected to Operazione Arcevia, the alternative community housing project first shown at the Venice Biennale in 1976, now marking its fiftieth anniversary.

Como Conservatory: Atto Puro

Ultrapresent Studio curates Atto Puro at the Como Conservatory, built around Cosmos, the audio system it designed in 2025 to revive a late-1970s composition by Giusto Pio, originally produced by Franco Battiato. Students from the Conservatory’s electronic music programme work through the space daily, and visitors are invited to sit in on a live, evolving listening session.

Aldo Galli Academy: After Evidence

After Evidence, the third issue of IED’s Notes on Plural Intelligences, comes out of research into an archive of forensic images. It grew from a collaboration between IED and LABANOF-MUSA, the University of Milan’s forensic anthropology lab, which holds a collection of around 20,000 skeletons spanning nearly 2,000 years. The show doesn’t try to turn this material into a straightforward story. Instead it sits with fragments, sound, and image to ask how something built to establish fact can also become a space for memory and attention.

Lecco: three new venues

The festival’s move into Lecco brings three projects. Oltre al Vedere, curated by Francesca Brambilla and developed by Cultura Meccanica at the Politecnico di Milano’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, builds audio-tactile devices that let blind and partially sighted visitors experience design and art through touch and sound — this year’s centrepiece is a sensory version of Vico Magistretti’s Eclisse lamp.

At the Politecnico’s Lecco campus, Unstable Borders comes out of the AMALPI MORE research project on landslides and Alpine landscape change, using models and data to make the slow movement of mountains perceptible. Alongside it, Alpine Landscapes: Traces of Stone, Community Bonds Between Italy and Switzerland presents the PAESALP project, which looks at traditional stone construction and craft across the Italy–Switzerland border region. A third Lecco show, Eterno Femminino, curated by Francesca Brambilla, Filippo Invernizzi, and Fabio Martini, uses Paleolithic and Neolithic Venus figurines alongside work by contemporary artists to trace how images of femininity have shifted between archetype and stereotype over time.

Studio Visits and Rationalist Como

As in past editions, the festival runs its Studio Visit programme, opening design studios, galleries, ateliers, and archives across the region to the public, alongside a guided tour of Como’s Rationalist architecture.

Why visit 

This year’s edition steps outside Como for the first time, taking the festival’s design and archive exhibitions into Lecco. With over fifty international designers on show alongside historic archives from Ico Parisi, Lina Bo Bardi and Carla Badiali, it’s a rare chance to see contemporary design sit side by side with the region’s design heritage.

Practical note

The festival is genuinely worth the trip, but accessibility varies a lot by venue. The exhibitions in central Como are easy to reach on foot, no issues there. Villa del Grumello, the Serre, and the Chilometro della Conoscenza involve uneven paths, stairs, or distances that can be tough if you have any mobility limitations, so it’s worth planning ahead if that applies to you. We don’t yet have details on accessibility in Lecco, since this is its first year as part of the festival.

Lake Como Design Festival

Como & Lecco, September 12-20, 2026

Seven editions so far
For professional and general public
Size: 20+ site-specific locations, 650+ designers and galleries involved 100,000+ visitors