The room that felt like home

 Giulio Cappellini arrived in London with the quiet authority of someone who has spent decades deciding what a room should feel like. He was in town for Clerkenwell Design Week 2026, presenting The Italian Hospitality – an immersive installation commissioned by the Italian Trade Agency and curated with INTERNI Magazine – alongside a talk on luxury interiors at Istituto Marangoni London. For a man who has shaped the visual language of contemporary living as thoroughly as almost anyone alive, the visit felt less like a promotional tour than a natural extension of a lifelong conversation.

The Italian Trade Agency had been building its presence at Clerkenwell since 2022, and this year its showcase took the form of an installation conceived by Cappellini in his role as Design Ambassador for Italian Design Day 2026. Around 40 Italian companies contributed to a space where industrial production and artisanal craft sat comfortably side by side, anchored in shades of green, neutral tones and what Cappellini simply called refined materials. The goal, he said, was to make people feel at home. It sounds modest. It is not.

Coherence across so many different brands, he explained, came from a shared devotion to excellence. Quality, in his telling, is the universal language. On young designers, he was direct: he had no interest in new products. He wanted new ways of thinking – ideas that met the world where it was, or better still, got there first. Passion, he said, was non-negotiable.

His definition of luxury followed the same logic. A great interior could not be replicated wholesale from one country to the next. Finishes, colour, cultural memory – all of it mattered. The best spaces, he suggested, were always a negotiation between the international and the deeply, irreducibly local.