For those who were at Milan Design Week in April, the work of NM3 would have been hard to miss. From their collaboration with Visionnaire at 10 Corso Como and an installation for Armani Archivio to a domestic-meets-retail environment for Swedish textile brand Magniberg and a site-specific listening room for Stone Island in a disused swimming pool, the whole city was peppered with their work. Meanwhile, its Casa NM3 installation, in the north of Milan, offered a clear demonstration of the domestic opportunities of their products, staged within a contemporary home interior.
NM3 and Wallpaper* at Milan Design Week 2026
We have been observing the industrial design studio's work with interest for some time, so we tasked them with creating furniture for the Milan Design Week debut of our new Travel Guides series, which we launched from a city kiosk reimagined by long-term collaborator DWA. The furniture, which included a bench and a magazine/book display with removable shelves, featured the studio's distinctive galvanised steel finish and modular composition.
‘Our goal is to demonstrate that our systems can, and will, do many things, so it's interesting for us to respond to any functional requirement through our language,' says co-founder Nicolò Ornaghi. ‘We want to solve problems through the most basic functionalist approach.'
A contemporary approach to materiality and modularity
Founded in Milan in 2020 by Ornaghi and Francesco Zorzi, who are both architects, and photographer Delfino Sisto Legnani, NM3 works exclusively with a single material, steel, operating with an ethos that is grounded in radical essentialism.
‘Metal fabrication is the most common among family-run businesses in northern Italy, so we opted to explore the full potential of this technology and material,' says Ornaghi. Operating as a design studio, production aggregator (collaborating with a network of local manufacturers) and brand, NM3 comfortably merges the worlds of fashion, art and design.
In their furniture, steel panels intersect to form the structural base for tables; standard modules are arranged into infinitely composable storage units; and perforated metal sheets serve as supports for upholstered modular sofas or beds. Screws or welded corners are visible, and the material is mostly left raw or, at most, polished to reveal its most expressive potential.
We like to work within the rules defined by manufacturing restrictions. Within these limits, we find a lot of freedom
Nicolò Ornaghi, co-founder NM3
The studio in its present incarnation was born out of necessity. Pre-2020, the trio's practice mainly focused on exhibition design (the metal offered an alternative to the wood pallet aesthetic that dominated the field, at a similarly cheap cost) and when that stopped during the pandemic, they needed to come up with a new job. ‘We had to look elsewhere and the home was the most logical place to turn to,' says Ornaghi.
At the core of their output are a series of ‘fundamental' rules. ‘What we produce, and our aesthetic approach, are closely linked to what we can do, not what we want to do,' says Ornaghi. ‘We like to work within the rules defined by manufacturing restrictions, in a contemporary creative context where we look for our role within the rules. Within these limits, we find a lot of freedom.'
Not coincidentally, their aesthetic is rooted in modernism: ‘We are nostalgic for the modern movement,' admits Ornaghi, mentioning some of the trio's creative pillars, which range from Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Egon Eiermann to Richard Neutra and Angelo Mangiarotti (‘his designs were conceived like his architecture'), representing ‘an architecture for people, done intelligently, at reasonable cost and with a modernist aesthetic'.
For them, the visual language is as important (possibly even more important) than the project itself, and they see their work as an evolution of a process rather than individual design experiences. At the core of their practice, there is always a functionality rooted in the most classic industrial design approach, a refreshing point of view that allows (and has so far allowed) for virtually infinite possibilities. ‘We are not here to be inventors, we are here to solve problems,' notes Ornaghi.