QuadroDesign booth at Salone del Mobile 2025 – Photos by Luca A. Caizzi, unless stated.

Design. Waste is an open secret at design fairs. For all the talk of circularity and conscious making, the pavilions and installations are, more often than not, headed straight for the skip once the crowds disperse. For this year’s Salone del Mobile, QuadroDesign has decided to do something about that.

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The Italian manufacturer — known for its stainless steel faucets and accessories — has consistently placed sustainability at the centre of its operations, from materials and production systems through to supply chain and distribution. Rather than commissioning a booth designed to impress for five days and then disappear on the sixth, QuadroDesign tasked designer Giacomo Moor with building a booth that could be repurposed after the fair.

QuadroDesign mock-up of the first public bathroom in Masala – Photo by Omar Sartor.

The answer came through a partnership with Koalisation, an organisation operating on the ground in Zambia. Once dismantled, the stand will travel to Masala, in the country’s central region, where it will be reassembled as a permanent public restroom adjacent to the local coal market — complete with changing rooms, toilets, and showers. The facility is due to open in August 2026.

The markets there are staffed largely by women, frequently accompanied by their children, working in conditions with little sanitary infrastructure and scarce access to water. For them, this will be the first public restroom of its kind.

“This year’s booth is not a temporary object, but an architecture capable of changing function, location, and meaning,” says Enrico Magistro of QuadroDesign. “Giving the stand a second life is not a symbolic or narrative operation, but a concrete choice that restores value to what is normally considered waste.”

Moor’s structure was designed with this double life in mind from the outset: a modular wooden grid joined by four-way metal connectors, clad with panels that serve as partitions, shelving, or roofing — expandable, reducible, and standardised to a single cross-section dimension for ease of replication.

As Moor puts it, the ambition was to treat the stand as “a true piece of architecture” — one where, ultimately, “the person, rather than the product, is at the centre.” For QuadroDesign, that distinction is the whole point.

Photos by Omar Sartor, Luca A. Caizzi.

Project illustrations, Giacomo Moor – QuadroDesign.