For T Magazine’s annual Salone del Mobile party, which this year also celebrated the magazine’s 20th anniversary, the designer and entrepreneur Ramdane Touhami oversaw a festive installation in the garden of Milan’s Villa Necchi Campiglio, a Rationalist-style house dating to 1935. In addition to running his creative agency, Art Recherche Industrie, the Paris-based Touhami founded the Société Helvétique d’Impression Typographique, a printing press and typography studio. He’s long been interested in the visual appeal of the alphabet, so when he took over the villa’s garden, he planned a theme that revolved around a single letter.
T-shaped ice cubes floated in cocktails poured by bartenders who had flown in from Drei Berge — the hotel Touhami opened in Mürren, Switzerland, in 2022 — and inflatable silver letters drifted across the surface of the villa’s pool. The Paris-based chef Rose Chalalai Singh served Thai-Italian snacks like sticky rice arancini and tagliatelle pad Thai, working at a grill station in the form of a T. For dessert, bite-size T-shaped madeleines baked by the chefs at Drei Berge functioned as birthday cakes. And as guests filtered out at the end of the evening, they were handed keepsakes including pasta resembling dozens of tiny Ts. “It’s the beginning of the spring and it’s a birthday,” said Touhami. “We had to make it fun.”