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Loop by Ethimo and Elena Salmistraro: An Outdoor Sofa Previewed at Salone del Mobile. Milano 2026
- Style Essentials Edit Team
- 52 minutes ago
- 3 min read
Salone del Mobile. Milano returns in 2026 as one of the most anticipated events in the global design calendar, drawing designers, brands, architects, and industry professionals from across the world to Milan for a week that consistently sets the direction for where furniture and interior design are heading. The 2026 edition continues that tradition, with previews and launches arriving from some of the most established names in Italian and international design, each using the platform to introduce work that has been in development for months and in some cases years. Ethimo and Elena Salmistraro's collaboration is one of the most interesting presentations before the fair, not because it's the loudest or most visually aggressive, but because it asks a genuinely different question about what an outdoor sofa can be and how it can be used.
Ethimo is an Italian outdoor furniture brand with a long and considered history of working with natural materials and bringing the language and sensibility of interior design into exterior spaces. The brand has built its reputation on pieces that take the outdoor environment seriously as a design context rather than treating it as a secondary or simplified version of indoor living, and its collaborations over the years have consistently reflected that position. The materials Ethimo works with—teak, rope, woven fiber, and carefully selected textiles—are chosen for how they perform outdoors over time as much as for how they look on the day they are photographed, and that commitment to material integrity runs through everything the brand produces.
Elena Salmistraro is a Milan-based designer whose work spans furniture, product design, and art, and whose formal language is immediately recognizable for its organic quality, its use of fluid and biomorphic shapes, and its resistance to the kind of geometric predictability that a lot of contemporary design defaults to. She works across categories and materials with a consistency of vision that makes her collaborations with established brands interesting precisely because her point of view is strong enough to push the work somewhere that the brand would not have arrived at alone. Her previous projects have demonstrated an ability to bring a sculptural sensibility into functional objects without losing sight of what the object is actually supposed to do, and that balance is visible again in Loop.
Loop is an outdoor sofa made up of a series of organic volumes that connect and flow into each other without a fixed beginning or end, and that structural logic is where the design conversation starts. It is not a sofa in the conventional sense of a back, two arms, and a seat arranged in a predetermined orientation—the volumes that make up Loop come together in a way that allows for multiple interpretations of how you sit within or around the piece, and Salmistraro has spoken about conceiving it more as an organism than as furniture, something with a fluid body and a continuous movement that feels instinctive rather than calculated. The name Loop refers to this quality of continuity and natural rhythm, the way the piece folds back on itself and connects its different parts into what reads as a single uninterrupted form.
Salmistraro describes Loop as a fertile borderline, a hybrid shape that resists hierarchies and preordained attitudes, which for an outdoor sofa is a significantly different starting point from most of what the category offers. The piece's volumes combine in a kind of equilibrium, with each volume supporting and responding to the others, resulting in an overall form that feels balanced without being symmetrical and dynamic without being restless. Ethimo brings to the project its outdoor design experience and the structural and material knowledge that comes from making furniture that has to perform in exterior environments across different climates and conditions over time, while Salmistraro contributes the formal language and the sculptural ambition that gives Loop its character.
The result is a piece that sits somewhere between seating and sculpture without fully belonging to either category, which is exactly what Salmistraro was working toward. It is the kind of object that changes depending on how many people are using it, how they choose to arrange themselves within it, and what kind of outdoor space it is placed in; this openness to interpretation is built into the design rather than being incidental to it.
Loop will be presented at Salone del Mobile.Milano 2026.
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