Gaggia Open House: art, design and coffee at the Milano Design Week

The Milano Design Week Fuorisalone is always an exceptional occasion for creative minds and, for the first time, also Gaggia Milano was officially part of it.

For five days the Gaggia Open House opened its doors to welcome art, design and coffee culture and to create a lively, contemporary and inclusive space for the coffee lovers and everyone who wanted to disclose the Gaggia world. 

The chosen location was the famous Gli Eroici Furori art gallery, located in the Porta Venezia Design District, the same neighborhood where, in the 1930s, Achille Gaggia filed the patent for the revolutionary “Lampo system”, that forever changed the world of espresso. The company chose to come back to its origins, where everything started, presenting and offering a space that could be a way to tell about the roots and the heritage of the brand, engaging a numerous and participative audience in a multi-sensory and inspiring experience. 

The feedback is very positive, with hundreds of enthusiastic visitors, interesting masterclasses and talks, and the live artistic performances by three Italian artists who customize the new Classic GT espresso machines.

Gaggia Open House, day after day, became a reference point for a multi-faceted coffee break, a place where many people stopped by, chatted, participated, tried our products, discovered more on the Gaggia values and on the coffee universe. A real human and creative flow that animated the days with energy and curiosity.  

Coffee has been a red thread, a narrative pretense, a symbol of daily rituality. We have welcomed our aficionados, and, most of all, the ones who did not know the brand and its incredible history yet, the ones who wanted to learn and to get involved during the masterclasses, who asked us questions to choose their next espresso machine, and the ones who wanted to know more on the complex yet interesting world of specialty coffee, with moments of discovery and dialogue. 

It has been an important occasion to show the philosophy of Gaggia and its products, underlining the importance of Made in Italy, but also an opportunity to reflect on cultural languages, when coffee and design become grammar and syntax.

The main protagonists of the whole experience were the new Classic GT manual espresso machines. Every day, people were welcomed by freshly brewed espressos and cappuccinos, thanks to the baristas of Accademia Italiana Baristi. Then, the machines were also tried and tested by selected specialty coffee experts for their masterclasses. 

Moreover, as we were in an art gallery, we could not miss the chance for live artistic performances. This is why we involved three Italian artists to customize the new Classic GT: Luca Font, Eugenio Filippi and Marta Lagna. Their intervention was more than just decorative. It was part of a wider storytelling in which the machine became a unique piece of art, reflecting each artist’s soul, vision, and sensitivity.

Luca Font: pattern urbano e design funzionale

Visual artist, illustrator and designer with a strong background in the urban subcultures – from graffiti to punk, street art illustrations and tattoos – Luca Font transformed Classic GT in a piece of furniture with an imaginative design and a metropolitan allure. 

His customization consists in a figure who drinks coffee and that becomes, with a cup, the open eye of the following character, in an infinite pattern. A graphic narration based on the energy of waking up, the cyclicality of a morning gesture that meets the aesthetic of a contemporary design.

Eugenio “Ment” Filippi: solids, voids, and steel 

Architect and artist, Eugenio Filippi aka MENT brought his universe made of geometries and solids on the bodywork of Classic GT. His understanding of colors comes in contact with the interactions between shapes and steel, originating an elegant game of solids and voids. “The many faces of the bodywork allows me to play with color, and to remove it somewhere to make the steel pop out” he says. 

The result? A balanced composition of architectonic rigor and artistic expression, where metal and color dance together.

Marta Lagna: words decorate a vision

With the precision and poetry typical of the calligraphic writing, Marta Lagna wanted to describe the soul of the company through the power of words. Her project is a texture made of black letters, a visual weaving where three words, dear to Gaggia, appear in red: ritual, art, design.
Lagna built a dense typography palette able to transform a coffee machine into a narrative object. The chassis becomes a canvas where visions appear, in a unique  net of form and meaning.

An all-round project

Gaggia Open House was an all-round project, thought with extreme care for every detail and lived enthusiastically by all visitors. An experience that showed how design can be a bridge among people, a common space where aesthetics, taste, tales and functionality can meet. It is just like coffee: a simple drink yet rich of nuances and stories, able to bring people together.

A project that gave Gaggia the chance to present the newest coffee machines, its values and its offering, but also to create connections, foster conversations, stimulate new ideas. 

During the Milano Design Week, where every corner can offer stimuli and visual provocations, the Gaggia Open House made a difference for its ability to enhance intimacy, collectivity and dialogues, and to create a sense of belonging. Coffee was the glue for a bigger story, made of art, relations, shared visions. And that will be fixed in minds…just like the first sip of a great cup of espresso.