For Milan Design Week 2025, Lavazza teams up with Brazilian architect and designer Juliana Lima Vasconcellos to present Source of Pleasure, a large-scale installation that explores coffee through space, material, and sensory cues. Open to the public from April 6 to 13 at Palazzo del Senato, the project offers a new experience of 100% coffee, built around a recently developed innovation that Lavazza introduces for the first time during the fair.
Setting and Concept
Located in the courtyard of Palazzo del Senato, home to the Milan State Archives in the Porta Venezia Design District, Source of Pleasure transforms the historical space into a site of calm immersion. With its 18 meter circular form and rich tones echoing the color of roasted coffee, the structure reflects both the raw material and the ritual that surrounds it. Visitors step into an atmosphere that references both tradition and future thinking, connecting Lavazza’s 130 years of coffee expertise with contemporary design language.
Juliana Lima Vasconcellos designed the installation to evoke a contemplative mood. Though monumental in scale, the work avoids theatrics. Instead, it invites pause, smell, texture, and stillness, qualities rarely foregrounded in a high-energy design week setting. The structure’s form and surface express the brand’s identity not through logos or campaigns, but through material and atmosphere.
Installation Details
For Lavazza’s installation, she applies this philosophy to create a structure that doesn’t just represent coffee but expresses it. The space itself becomes a medium. Light filters through the colonnade of Palazzo del Senato and hits the installation’s curved surfaces, reinforcing the sensory focus of the experience.
The installation aligns with Lavazza’s larger strategy: turning its coffee legacy into a platform for design, innovation, and storytelling. By marking the brand’s 130th year with this project, Lavazza moves beyond product display and into spatial narrative.
Coffee as Medium and Message
Rather than replicate the structure of a café or showroom, Source of Pleasure uses abstraction to connect with its material origin. The scent of coffee permeates the space, grounding the visual minimalism in an unmistakable sensory reference. The title itself points not only to coffee as a drink but to the emotions, memories, and daily rituals it activates.
About the Designer
Juliana Lima Vasconcellos brings a multi-disciplinary background to the project. Based in Brazil, she works across architecture, interiors, and collectible design. Her studio emphasizes material richness, color balance, and strong silhouettes. With a focus on simplicity and precision, she creates spaces and objects that feel both grounded and elevated. Her past exhibitions include Design Miami, PAD London, Nomad Circle, and The Salon NY, and her works belong to collections at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York and the Museum of Brazilian Chairs.
In 2024, Vasconcellos won the CDA Prize in Paris for best commercial and cultural interior design. Publications across Europe and the Americas have featured her work, and Elle Decor USA has named her to its A-List of influential design figures three times. She approaches design as a practice of editing, carefully assembling elements that communicate through form and surface rather than ornament.
