Hannes Peer and Officine Saffi Lab: a collaboration that redefines ceramics

In view of Milan Design Week 2026, Hannes Peer and Officine Saffi Lab announce a collaboration that places ceramics at the centre of a clear design idea: slow, layered and deeply connected to material. What is planned for Fuorisalone 2026 - taking place from 20 to 26 April - will be a large-scale intervention in which ceramics take on a structural role. Not an applied surface, but an element that builds space, defines its rhythms, reacts to light and preserves traces of the production process.

Officine Saffi Lab is a Milan-based studio dedicated to experimentation in contemporary ceramics. More than a traditional workshop, it is a place of research where material is explored as a language, through processes that combine artisanal knowledge, international techniques and experimental approaches. Over time, the studio has developed strong expertise in managing complex, large-scale projects, working on surfaces, volumes and ceramic systems that go beyond the scale of the object. Collaborations with design companies such as Cassina and Poliform, fashion brands like Bottega Veneta, Loro Piana and Fendi, and architects and artists including Ronan Bouroullec, Elisa Ossino, Giampiero Tagliaferri and Alberto Garutti show a cross-disciplinary approach, where ceramics become a tool for dialogue between different fields.


The Circle, Elisa Ossino, Furniture Collection © officinesaffilab

This is the context in which the work of Hannes Peer takes shape. He leads Hannes Peer Architecture, a multidisciplinary studio founded in Milan in 2009. An architect and designer originally from Alto Adige and based in Milan for over twenty-five years, Peer has developed a practice that moves across architecture, interior design and product design. His projects range from hotels and cocktail bars in New York, such as The Manner and Sloane’s, to boutiques, private residences and installations, as well as recent projects for established brands like Baxter and Minotti. His work is marked by strong attention to context, materiality and the narrative dimension of space, where the history of architecture and design becomes a working tool rather than a decorative reference. In recent years, Peer has intensified research focused on sculptural and collectible design, collaborating with international galleries such as Nilufar and with research-based brands like SEM, 6:AM and La Chance. In this sense, ceramics represent a natural step: a complex material that brings together technical precision and unpredictability, design control and the hand-made gesture.


Photography: Henrik Blomqvist, Courtesy of Hannes Peer                                                                             The Manner Hotel, New York, Photography: Chris Mottalini, Courtesy of Hannes Peer

The collaboration between Hannes Peer and Officine Saffi Lab is based on a shared vision: using design as a tool for investigation, and material as a way to question the present. It is a project that looks at the past without nostalgia, and uses ceramics to explore new spatial and narrative possibilities. At Milan Design Week 2026, the result of this vision will be an environment to walk through rather than simply observe. An invitation to rethink ceramics not as a simple object, but as architecture, experience and storytelling.