Serena Confalonieri for Caffé Milani: a designer special edition for the Collezione Privata blend

Caffé Milani presents a new edition of Collezione Privata, created in collaboration with designer Serena Confalonieri: a project in which coffee becomes a narrative surface, blending graphics, perception, and materiality.

Not a new product, but a visual reinterpretation of an existing blend, which acquires a new expressive depth through the language of design.

Collezione Privata is, in fact, one of the most representative blends in the history of Caffé Milani. Its origin dates back to 1946, when Celestino Milani developed an original blend noted on a simple sheet of paper: a date, two initials - C.P. - and a composition of coffee from Brazil, Colombia, and India. Kept for years in the laboratory in Como, the recipe resurfaced in the 1970s, when Pierluigi Milani decided to reproduce it, giving life to a coffee with a balanced and enveloping profile, with notes of cocoa, dried fruit, and a slight nuance of red berries.

"With this project, we wanted to offer a new way of interpreting Collezione Privata, a blend to which we are emotionally very attached, enhancing a mixture already part of our range through design. The collaboration with Serena Confalonieri represents an opportunity for us to explore the dialogue between product and visual language, keeping the quality and identity of the coffee at the center," comments Elisabetta Milani.

A Milan-based designer and art director, Serena Confalonieri works in the fields of product, interior, graphic, and textile design, collaborating with excellent companies and artisans both in Italy and abroad. Her highly distinctive stylistic signature is built around a graphic, colorful, and emotional vision, featuring decorative hyperboles and geometric shapes.

Furnishings, self-produced collections, installations, interiors, and graphic projects are fragments of a precise stylistic universe: they can be read individually or as a kaleidoscopic whole. She has collaborated with important companies in the design sector and beyond, and her work has been exhibited at prestigious venues such as the Triennale di Milano and Palazzo Brancaccio.

At the heart of the project in collaboration with Caffé Milani is a recurring element: the spiral, a sign already present in the roastery's spaces, a soft and enveloping symbol that recalls coffee and its aroma, here reinterpreted as an upward movement, an evocation of its most sensory dimension. The composition develops through layering: the sign expands, wraps, and traverses the surface, creating levels of depth where the letters emerge and hide, in a continuous balance between the visible and the invisible.

The graphic system stems from a reworking of organic elements linked to coffee - the flower and the leaf - translated into wavy visual modules that dialogue with the movement of smoke, generating a dynamic structure that recalls, in an abstract key, the aromatic complexity of the blend. The color palette is developed in warm, deep tones, inspired by coffee and its sensory profiles, with shades that follow the movement of the spiral and expand the composition beyond the edges of the label, creating an enveloping, almost atmospheric effect.

"The spiral - an architectural element that is a protagonist of the Caffé Milani headquarters - becomes a generative sign upon which to build a layered composition. I worked through subtraction and visual interference, translating organic elements of coffee into a graphic system capable of evoking its sensory complexity," says Serena Confalonieri.

This collaboration thus represents a new chapter for Caffé Milani, in which the product opens up to new forms of storytelling, in an encounter between roasting and design where coffee becomes not only a tasting experience but also a sign, rhythm, and image.

The special edition of Collezione Privata signed by Serena Confalonieri will be available online from April 17th, at Caffè&Caffè stores (Como, Lecco, Monza, Seregno) and in Milan at the 1937 cafeteria, on the corner of Via Spadari and Via Cantù.