Review: MINI and Paul Smith’s “A Garden of Curiosity” at Salone del Mobile 2026

[DimON]

Milan during Salone del Mobile week is a city that has seen everything. Every brand with a design story to tell, and several that don’t have one but try anyway, takes over a palazzo, a courtyard, or a converted warehouse and asks the public to care. Most of it is forgettable within hours. Some of it is actively embarrassing. And occasionally, something lands with enough intelligence and restraint that you leave thinking differently about the brand behind it.
“A Garden of Curiosity,” the MINI and Paul Smith installation now open at Palazzo Borromeo d’Adda, is the third kind.

Getting There

The setting does a lot of work before you’ve experienced a single designed object. Palazzo Borromeo d’Adda is one of those Milanese addresses that communicates seriousness without trying. Arriving through the courtyard, the first thing you encounter isn’t the garden at all. Before visitors even reach the installation, there is a curated display of three MINI x Paul Smith cars spanning nearly three decades, ? arranged without fanfare against the palazzo’s historic architecture. No plinths. No spotlights. Just the cars, in context, asking to be looked at properly.

This is where the experience begins to distinguish itself. Most automotive brand activations put the car last, or treat it as punctuation at the end of a long sentence about brand values. Here the cars come first, and they carry the weight of nearly 30 years of creative history between two British institutions whose collaboration stretches back to 1998.

The Cars as Argument

The three cars on display are not chosen randomly. They represent genuinely distinct positions within the partnership, and placing them together makes each one more legible.

The 1999 Paul Smith 40th Anniversary Mini is the most exuberant of the trio, its bodywork covered in 86 stripes across 26 colours, with the playfulness extending inside to details like a lime green glovebox. ? It is maximalist and celebratory, a car that wears its personality on the outside with no apology. Standing next to it, the MINI STRIP by Paul Smith argues the precise opposite. Guided by the theme of simplicity, transparency, and sustainability, the STRIP applied the concept of maximum reduction to produce a minimalist design inside and out, with the body left in its unfinished state and grinding marks from the factory deliberately left intact as what Smith called “the perfect imperfection.”

The distance between those two objects, one made of colour and noise, the other of restraint and exposed steel, is the most interesting thing in the courtyard. It demonstrates that this partnership has never been about a single aesthetic. It has been about a shared instinct for doing something deliberate, whatever direction that happens to point in.

The third car, the new MINI Cooper Cabrio Paul Smith Edition, completes the sequence. Rather than being presented on a stage or under a spotlight, it is woven into the installation itself. You don’t arrive at it, you discover it, which forces the car to exist as part of a broader design narrative rather than as a standalone product. The Nottingham Green accents on the mirror caps, grille, and wheel hubs reappear throughout the garden as a recurring design thread, connecting the car to its surroundings rather than isolating it from them. It’s a quiet but effective piece of environmental design thinking.

Into the Garden

The transition from courtyard to garden is marked by a red door, which functions as a deliberate threshold rather than a mere entrance. Through it, the space opens into planted pathways, open platforms, and cubic installations. The Paul Smith Signature Stripe runs through the garden as a recurring motif, present enough to be recognisable, restrained enough to avoid becoming wallpaper.
The key word here is pace. The garden is designed to slow you down, which is the right instinct for a week in which everyone is moving very fast between aperitivo and the next brand experience. The planting, the textures, and the spatial sequencing all encourage a kind of attention that most activations don’t ask for, because most activations don’t trust the visitor enough to slow down.

The Rooms

Two interior spaces extend the experience in different directions, and both are worth spending time in.

The Colour Theory Room is the more interactive of the two. Paul Smith’s palette is brought into direct conversation with the new edition’s colour story, with visitors able to arrange colour samples on a wall that accumulates and shifts across the day with each new contribution. It sounds gimmicky described on paper. In practice it works, partly because the colours themselves are genuinely considered, and partly because it invites participation without demanding it. You can engage or simply observe, and the room functions either way.

The Listening Room takes a different approach, using recordings of Smith discussing colour theory to extend the visual experience into something more contemplative. It is the quieter of the two spaces and probably the more effective. Hearing Smith talk about colour while surrounded by it does something that a wall of text or a product specification never could.

The Verdict

What MINI and Paul Smith have built in Milan this week is an installation that earns its place in a crowded week because it has something to say beyond the product it is nominally there to promote. By placing these cars within a broader design conversation, MINI reinforces what has made its best collaborations resonate. They’re not just special editions, they’re ideas on wheels. And by showing them together, in public, and with intention, MINI is treating its own history not as nostalgia, but as an active part of its present.

That’s harder to pull off than it looks. The temptation in a setting like this is to over-explain, to surround the objects with so much context and commentary that the objects themselves disappear. “A Garden of Curiosity” largely avoids that trap. It trusts the work, and the work holds up.
The full story of the MINI Cooper Paul Smith Edition and its place in nearly three decades of collaboration is covered in depth here on MotoringFile.

The post Review: MINI and Paul Smith’s “A Garden of Curiosity” at Salone del Mobile 2026 appeared first on MotoringFile.

View the full article