Discover how to furnish public spaces, waiting rooms, hubs, and collective environments while ensuring privacy and comfort.
Discover how to furnish public spaces, waiting rooms, hubs, and collective environments while ensuring privacy and comfort. Milani’s solutions include modular seating, acoustic panels, and community areas.
Privacy as a Design Requirement
In recent years, the concept of privacy in shared spaces has taken on an increasingly central role in interior design. It is no longer simply a matter of ensuring confidentiality in work or study environments, but of responding to a broader, cross-cutting need: to feel protected, focused, and at ease even in public and collective contexts such as waiting rooms, university hubs, hospitality spaces, hotel lounges, or cultural centres.
The challenge for architects and interior designers is twofold: to create welcoming, socially open environments while offering those who inhabit them zones of visual and acoustic privacy. A challenge that Milani embraces with a continuously evolving design approach, from individual seating to the construction of true community furnishing areas where privacy, comfort, and aesthetic identity coexist in balance.
Beyond Individual Seating: Milani’s Community Areas
Milani has expanded its design vision beyond the concept of individual seating. The new PLACES catalogue introduces the concept of community furnishing areas: integrated systems of seats, panels, pods, and accessories designed to transform large, open environments into articulated spaces where each zone responds to a specific need. From individual concentration to informal meetings, from relaxation breaks to professional encounters.
This evolution responds to a growing demand from clients operating in the hospitality, educational, healthcare, and corporate sectors: intelligently furnishing collective environments where privacy is not an optional extra, but an essential component of user well-being.
Milani’s Solutions for Privacy in Shared Spaces
Quiet – Modularity in the Service of Privacy
Quiet, designed by Alessandro Crosera and Elena Pistolato, is a modular seating system with gently squared forms that combines seat elements, armrests, and backrests to create endless configurations. From single armchairs to linear sofas, from island to corner compositions, Quiet is ideal for waiting rooms, lounge areas, and any environment where ensuring visual comfort and privacy is a priority.
The strength of Quiet lies in its adaptability: with interchangeable high and low backrests, it can delimit private zones within large open spaces, transforming into small islands of concentration without compromising the sense of openness.
Shock – Large Curved Compositions for Collective Spaces
Shock, designed by Alessandro Crosera, expresses its full potential in articulated compositions. Thanks to oblique elements that allow the creation of large curved seating, Shock is particularly well suited to large collective environments such as hotel lobbies, university spaces, airports, and corporate headquarters.
The optional partition walls that can be integrated into the composition transform the seating into comfortable semi-private spaces, capable of visually separating people from their surrounding context without creating rigid barriers. The result is a contemporary environment with a fresh, dynamic aesthetic that naturally balances openness and privacy.
Cocoon – Privacy as an Embrace
Cocoon, designed by Giovanni Ingignoli, is the quintessential multifunctional armchair for waiting areas. Its defining feature is the large sail that wraps around the backrest: a functional and decorative element alike, which protects the seated person without completely isolating them from the surrounding context.
The asymmetric design of the armrests allows the right side to be equipped with technological accessories, USB socket, LED lamp, swivel table, transforming Cocoon into a true personal workstation within a public space. Available in lounge or light versions, it is designed for medical practices, hotel lobbies, banking spaces, and corporate waiting areas where the quality of the welcome is part of the identity of the place.
People – The Privacy Ecosystem in Motion
The People collection, designed by Alessandro Crosera, represents Milani’s most comprehensive response to privacy needs in shared work and study spaces. Not a single seat, but a modular ecosystem that comes in different configurations depending on the level of privacy required:
People Set
Designed for coworking spaces, study halls, and corporate lounges. The enveloping panels isolate from noise and visual distractions, creating focused workstations within open environments.
People Home
The most private configuration: high backrests, an integrated roof, and internal lighting ensure a high level of isolation, ideal for long work sessions or private meetings in shared environments
People Work
A complete operational workstation with integrated shelves, work surfaces, and power sockets. Transforms any corner into a functional, autonomous space.
People Talk
The collective dimension of privacy: a circular modular seat for 6–8 people, designed for micro-meetings and informal brainstorming in fluid environments.
People Phone
The compact solution for a private phone call or video call in an open space. Equipped with a support surface and scratch-resistant metal base.
Plot – Privacy That Starts from the Walls
Plot, designed by Margherita Rui, is a line of sound-absorbing panels for floor, wall, and ceiling that approaches the theme of privacy from a different perspective: not the seat that protects, but the environment itself that transforms.
Inspired by the textile weave of Milani’s manufacturing tradition, Plot is composed of mono- or two-tone padded squares that create an interplay of surfaces, textures, and shades. The result is a system of acoustic and visual control that redefines the space with elegance, ideal for conference rooms, open spaces, hospitality venues, and educational environments where background noise is a problem to be solved without sacrificing aesthetics.
Where to Apply These Solutions: Key Contexts
Waiting Rooms
Medical practices, banks, public offices, corporate headquarters: Cocoon and Quiet are the ideal solutions to ensure comfort and discretion while waiting.
University Hubs and Educational Spaces
People Set, People Work, and Shock transform classrooms and common areas into flexible environments suited to both individual study and group work.
Hotel Lobbies and Hospitality Spaces
Shock in large curved compositions and Cocoon in lounge areas create welcoming atmospheres where guests feel at ease even in shared environments.
Corporate and Business Premises
The entire People range, combined with Plot panels, meets the needs of a modern office: open to collaboration yet attentive to individual concentration.
Cultural and Public Spaces
Museums, libraries, civic centres: Quiet and Shock offer aesthetically refined solutions that integrate into architecturally significant contexts.
To explore Milani's solutions for coworking and shared workspaces, read our article on design and coworking spaces.
Il design come strumento di benessere
Privacy in shared spaces is not a contradiction, but a design challenge that design can and must embrace. Milani does so with a clear vision: to offer solutions that do not sacrifice social openness in the name of privacy, but that find the balance between the two dimensions through quality design, careful material selection, and the flexibility of compositions.
From contract furnishing to hospitality, from offices to educational spaces, Milani’s collections transform privacy from a requirement into an added value — for those who inhabit the spaces and for those who design them.
Discover all Milani solutions for privacy and comfort in shared spaces.
Discover Milani’s References for Shared Spaces
Milani’s solutions are applied in numerous public, educational, and corporate contexts, where comfort, privacy, and design flexibility become central elements of the user experience.
Among the most significant references:
- Gruppo Building
A project that interprets contemporary workspaces through fluid, welcoming, people-centred environments, where Milani seating contributes to creating areas dedicated to concentration, meeting, and interaction.
→ Discover the Gruppo Building project
- University of Ferrara – Teaching Hub
An intervention designed for the educational world, where comfort, functionality, and management of collective spaces work together to offer environments suited to studying, collaboration, and extended stays.
→ Discover the University of Ferrara Teaching Hub project
Discover all Milani projects dedicated to shared, hospitality, corporate, and educational spaces.