Milan Design Week 2026
Do play with your food
During Milan Design Week 2026, we brought five pairs of creatives from the culinary and design world together to co-create a room and a menu around a real life at home scenario.
What if the kitchen had no rules? Lydia and Alessandra both grew up watching from the outside. So they built a kitchen that lets children in. One made for every height, every pair of hands, where the walls are there to draw on and adults and children move through the space together. Pasta is a little bit like play dough, but at the end, you eat it. And it's green, red and blue.
Scroll down to shop the look. Don’t forget to play with your food while you try the recipe.
Alessandra Lauria
Alessandra is a Sicilian-born pasta maker and culinary experience designer based between Lisbon and Italy. Her work explores pasta as a craft and cultural language, rooted in ingredient integrity, seasonality and respect for raw materials. She is also the founder of Smile and Make Pasta, bringing hands-on workshops to children and families experiencing long-term illness.
Lydia Chan
Lydia is a Canadian-born multidisciplinary artist and set designer whose work creates immersive visual narratives across varied mediums. Raised on cartoons, she finds beauty in the handmade, where tactility, intuition and curated chaos meet.
“There are accessibility elements in the kitchen at children's height so they can experience the space without having to elevate themselves,” says Lydia. "The MAMMUT stool becomes an island," says Lydia. "I'm trying to take children's furniture and turn it into pieces that adults would also be interested in."
"A kitchen that welcomes children isn't just a better kitchen for children. It's a better kitchen for everyone."
“When children make pasta, they're competing. Trying to make the longest one, the most colourful one, or the biggest mess. Instead of approaching it from the logic of making food, they're just playing."
Recipe:
Joy in scribble
Strands of coloured pasta runs freely across the dough. Each raviolo becomes a small edible drawing, unique in its pattern.
Inside, a soft filling of ricotta, peas and chard celebrates the freshness of spring.
Ingredients
Filling
300 g raw chard, finely chopped
120 g frozen green peas
30 g leek, finely chopped
80 g ricotta, well drained
80 g parmesan, grated
50 g fine breadcrumbs
50 g extra virgin olive oil
1–2 garlic cloves
Zest of ½ lemon
Salt and black pepper
Main white pasta dough
300 g 00 flour
100 g fine semolina
200 g egg whites
Blue dough (for scribbles)
200 g 00 flour
80 g semolina
3 eggs
2–3 teaspoons blue spirulina
Red dough (for scribbles)
100 g semolina
1 medium egg
10 g beetroot powder
5 g sweet paprika
Serves 4-6 people
Step-by-step
Step 1 – Make the filling
Heat a pan with half the olive oil. Add garlic and the chard. Cook until wilted and soft. Season with salt. Remove any excess moisture and leave to cool. In a separate pan, heat the remaining olive oil. Add the leek and cook gently until soft. Add the peas and cook until tender and bright green. Leave to cool. In a bowl, combine the cooked chard, peas and leek, ricotta, breadcrumbs and lemon zest. Season with salt and pepper.
Tip: Add a little more breadcrumbs if too wet.
Step 2 – Make the pasta
White pasta dough:
Place the flour and semolina in a bowl or on a work surface. Add the egg whites and mix until a rough dough forms. Knead until smooth and elastic.
Blue dough (for scribbles):
Mix the blue spirulina with the eggs. Add to the flour and semolina and mix to combine. Knead until smooth.
Red dough (for scribbles):
Mix the beetroot powder and sweet paprika with the egg. Add to the semola. Knead until smooth and firm. Wrap and leave all 3 doughs to rest for 15 minutes.
Mixing colours:
Get creative mixing scribbles of the colours onto the white dough and roll them together to make beautiful mixed colour pasta sheets.
Assemble:
After rolling out the dough, cut into even squares and spoon the filling onto the centre of each. Place another square on top and seal.
Step 3 – Cook the pasta
Then simply, place your pasta into water and cook for 3-4 mins before serving.