Hard Hats and Dustpans

 There is a certain kind of design that asks us to reconsider the objects we habitually ignore: the broom behind the door, the plunger beside the toilet, the shovel abandoned in the garage. At Milan Design Week 2026, Seletti turns its attention precisely there.

Created with Eterno, the eleven-piece collection Tools transforms domestic and construction equipment — dustpans, hammers, wheelbarrows, trowels — into objects hovering between utility and sculpture. Rendered in Seletti’s signature pop-ironic language, the pieces treat manual labor with the same theatricality usually reserved for décor.

The collection also revisits Seletti’s own history. From the nineteen-sixties through the nineties, hardware and household goods formed the backbone of the company’s catalog. Tools feels less nostalgic than self-reflective: an industrial past refracted through decades of design experimentation.

Presented at Seletti’s flagship on Corso Garibaldi as the installation Building Design LTD., the project lands somewhere between a hardware store and a conceptual joke — which is, unmistakably, the point.