For one week each spring, Milan becomes the global capital of design. Fuorisalone, the citywide exhibition program that runs alongside Salone del Mobile, draws architects, specifiers, and design press into showrooms, courtyards, and pop-ups across the city.
La Marzocco Store, the legendary Florentine espresso machine manufacturer, opened its Milan store as a Fuorisalone destination under two curatorial themes: Design Your Coffee Space and Bring the Café Home. For this edition, 15p, UniVicoustic's partner in Italy, partnered with La Marzocco to bring acoustic design into the conversation. The result is a fully specified sensory environment where sound, taste, and material are engineered together.
The Vision
A coffee bar is one of the most demanding acoustic environments in hospitality. Grinders, milk steaming, espresso extraction, conversations, and footsteps all compete inside a room built from hard surfaces like glass, stone, plaster, metal countertops. Left untreated, those surfaces reflect sound repeatedly. Background noise rises, speech intelligibility drops, and the subtlety of a well-extracted espresso loses its stage.
The brief for La Marzocco Milano was to make acoustic performance disappear into the architecture. The treatment had to match the store's terracotta-and-copper palette, read as a deliberate material choice rather than an acoustic add-on, and control reverberation across the full public area, from the Modbar counter to the home-machine showroom and the tasting table.
Featured UniVicoustic Solutions
- VicStrip Lite Double: The rhythmic slat walls that define the space, are clad in VicStrip Lite Double, specified in two finishes: Coral Haze for the signature warm-toned feature walls and Pearl. Made entirely from recycled high-density PET, the panel absorbs in the medium and high frequencies, exactly the range where grinders, steam wands, and conversation live.
- Flat Panel PET HD: A soft panel that dissolves into the architecture rather than competing with it. Manufactured from the same high-density recycled PET family as VicStrip Lite, the panel absorbs in the medium and high frequencies and features edges dyed through in the panel. It is the quiet half of the composition: where VicStrip Lite brings texture and warmth, Flat Panel PET HD brings calm, breadth, and the material continuity that lets a coffee bar sound as considered as it looks.
Together, the two products cover the acoustic range a hospitality-retail space demands: VicStrip Lite Double for character and rhythm on feature walls; Flat Panel PET HD for broadband absorption across the remaining surfaces. Both installed as part of the architecture, not layered on top of it.
The Result
Visitors walking into the La Marzocco Store Milan during Fuorisalone 2026 step into a space where conversation carries clearly over the sound of the grinder, where steam from the milk wand does not overwhelm a tasting, and where the design never announces that acoustic engineering is doing any work.
For 15p and UniVicoustic, the installation is more than a Milan Design Week moment. It is a case study in how acoustic design belongs in the earliest stages of any coffee shop, restaurant, or retail concept, not as a retrofit once the noise complaints arrive, but as a foundational layer of the sensory experience.
The La Marzocco Store Milan hosts the installation until April 26, 2026. If you are in Milan for Fuorisalone, we invite you to step inside, listen to the difference, and see how UniVicoustic solutions perform.
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