Salone Contract 2027: OMA’s masterplan

The 65th edition of the Salone del Mobile.Milano, from 13 to 18 April 2027 at Rho Fiera Milano, brings in a new player: Salone Contract. It is the biggest new feature of the year, and it comes with a masterplan by Rem Koolhaas and David Gianotten of OMA, the Rotterdam practice behind some of the most talked-about buildings of the last thirty years.

Salone Contract 2027: a new chapter for the Salone del Mobile.Milano

The idea behind it is simple to state and harder to carry out. In the contract market, value no longer sits in the single object but in the ability to bring together products, services, skills and management inside large and complex projects. Salone Contract sets out to give that market a home in Milan, during the week the design world already treats as its own. “Salone Contract for me is a place where suppliers, clients and people environments can meet and exchange knowledge on designing the environments,” says David Gianotten, Managing Partner of OMA.

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Salone Contract 2027 masterplan by OMA at Salone del Mobile.Milano, B2B Areas

From product to project: why the contract market needs its own stage

Contract changes the scale of the relationship between industry and clients. A well-made product is no longer enough on its own. Companies have to deal with architects, interior designers, developers, investors and operators, and meet demands that go well beyond the catalogue: customisation, large volumes, timing and costs, logistics, installation, and reliability from start to finish.

Gianotten puts it in plain terms: “Furniture alone or appliances alone don’t create a project.” A client asks a question and sets an ambition. A group of suppliers, designers and manufacturers then picks up that question and takes on “the overall responsibility and risk of producing that environment and also maintaining it during its lifespan.”

This is the shift the Salone wants to follow. Claudio Feltrin, President of FederlegnoArredo, describes Salone Contract as “a concrete project that aspires to become a fixed, globally unique event“, and admits that the wood-furnishing supply chain “must make a qualitative leap to respond to larger-scale projects and business.” For this reason, the exhibitors are selected: the show is aimed at companies able to combine design quality, industrial capacity and operational reliability.

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Salone Contract 2027 masterplan by OMA at Salone del Mobile.Milano, Project Space

OMA’s masterplan: a city, not a hall of stands

Rem Koolhaas and David Gianotten have not drawn a sequence of traditional stands. Their Salone Contract masterplan works like a trading floor, built around four elements: the Forum, the Podiums, the Project Spaces and the B2B areas. Each one is meant to help visibility, orientation, one-to-one meetings, project presentations and negotiations.

The model behind it is the city. “The masterplan of Salone Contract is set up in such a way that people are familiar with cities,” Gianotten explains. At the centre sits a plaza, the Forum, where everyone gathers, where presentations take place and where the main ambition of the event is broadcast. Around it, the area splits into quarters, each tied to a type of contract: boating, hospitality, residential, and cultural and institutional buildings such as offices.

OMA masterplan for Salone Contract with Forum, Podiums

The urban comparison goes further. Gianotten lists “the forum, the boulevard, the streets, the platforms, the business to business spaces like the cafés and the offices,” along with a museum that tells the story of the topic. He also leaves room for change: “It’s not fixed how that will evolve, like in a real city.” It will be the first year of Salone Contract, he notes, “so we’re still figuring a lot of things out.”
There is a historical thread as well. In Gianotten’s view, contract work has its roots in institutional and cultural buildings, “like churches, the city halls, the offices for the government. That’s where it all started in the past already, like back in 1400.”

Many roles, one environment

What makes contract interesting, for Gianotten, is the number of people it brings together. “You have an enormous range of professional people that all are working on that one environment and all have a role from the beginning to the end.” The masterplan tries to give each of these roles a place to meet the others, from the first brief to the delivery of the finished space.

OMA masterplan for Salone Contract, Dome

The size of the contract market: the PwC numbers

To back up the project, the Salone del Mobile.Milano has set up a partnership with PwC, which brings its knowledge of property and investment to the Salone’s knowledge of design and production. PwC’s first analyses put the global value of contract FF&E supplies (furniture, fixtures and equipment) between 80 and 100 billion euros across the main asset classes.

The research will go on, looking at investments, asset classes, pipelines and changes in client behaviour, and at the skills companies will need to move from product to project. In Italy, it comes with a series of meetings with businesses in Milan, Padua and Rome.

What Salone Contract means for Milan Design Week 2027

For many years the Salone del Mobile has been, above all, the place to show and judge the objects. Salone Contract does not set that aside, since the core exhibitions stay at the heart of the event. It adds a second layer, though, one that looks at how objects end up inside buildings, hotels, offices, homes and boats, and at the people who make that happen.

Maria Porro, President of the Salone del Mobile.Milano, sees it the same way. “The heart of the Salone lies in the companies and events that form its backbone,” she says. The new projects and the international focus “do not disrupt this core, but rather expand its capacity to generate opportunities, connecting businesses with new clients and with the people who design, make decisions, invest and purchase around the world.”

David Gianotten’s hopes for visitors point the same way. He would like people who come to the Salone, “the heart of the Milan Design Week in my point of view”, to “discover that there is much more than just the object”, and to find themselves, once they step over the threshold, “in a new environment and become curious and start participating.”

David Gianotten, Managing Partner of OMA. Photo Vincent van den Hoogen, courtesy OMA

The challenge now sits with the companies. Taking part in contract means building partnerships, sharing risk and offering services that last for the whole life of a project. Italian design has the quality and the know-how for it. Salone Contract may help many firms, especially the smaller ones, to find the right partners and the right scale. Its first edition will show how far the city imagined by OMA can turn into a working marketplace, and how it will grow from there.