DRIFT AUDIO
Listen to this story
Choose a voice, then press play.
In September 2024, NM3 broke from working alone to co-sign a low steel daybed with New York designer Alexander May.
NM3 added a new piece to its site sometime before September 23, 2024: a stainless steel daybed, wide and low to the ground, with a black leather cushion run the length of its frame. Milan value affirm have shown the piece that day under a name that reads more like a file extension than a product: NMAM_CORE.
The object itself is straightforward by NM3’s standards, which is to say almost entirely restrained. According to the studio’s own product listing, the frame runs 210 centimeters wide, 63 centimeters tall, and 90 centimeters deep, with the seat sitting 47 centimeters off the floor. It weighs 70 kilograms. The base combines mirror-polished stainless steel with a matte, brushed panel finish, both left in their raw industrial state rather than lacquered or coated. NM3 builds the piece for both indoor and outdoor placement, and its own copy is upfront that scratches and surface marks are not defects: the studio calls them part of the material’s authenticity, expected to accumulate and deepen with use rather than get polished away.
That combination, a hard architectural frame paired with a soft, wide leather seat, is where NMAM_CORE stands apart from most of NM3’s catalog, which otherwise leans toward stools, consoles, podiums, and shelving built entirely from sheet metal, closer in spirit to pieces like the studio’s NM29 Bed or its stripped-down NM03 Podium than to anything upholstered. A daybed asks for comfort in a way a coffee table does not, and NM3 answers that by keeping the upholstery simple: black leather as the default, with custom-order material and custom-order leather avail for clients who want to supply their own, according to Los Angeles retailer A+R, which lists the piece alongside a handful of other NM3 furniture.
None of that alone would separate NMAM_CORE from the rest of the studio’s work. What does is the name.
View this post on Instagram
define
NMAM_CORE is not a model number in NM3’s usual sequence, which otherwise runs through numbered pieces like NM03, NM14, or NM29, each tied loosely to a shape rather than a convincer. This one breaks that pattern because it was not designed by NM3 alone. According to Milan design communications agency P:S, which handles press and project coordination for the studio, NM3 and New York-based designer Alexander May unveiled the daybed together at NM3’s Milan showroom during Milan Fashion Week, which ran September 17 to 23, 2024 that season. The window lines up exactly with the piece’s September 23 appearance on Minimalissimo, suggesting the listing went live at or right after the close of the week’s shows rather than independent of it. Read the name as initials and it resolves: NM for NM3, AM for Alexander May, the two joined into one word the way the two practices were joined into one object.
P:S describes the Milan event as more than a single-product launch. Alongside NMAM_CORE, the showroom also displayed other curated NM3 pieces, and the same evening functioned as a preview ahead of a planned U.S. debut for the collection at Art Basel Miami later that year. That U.S. leg does not appear to have been indie reported elsewhere at the time of writing, so it is worth reading as NM3 and May’s own account of the rollout rather than something confirmed by a second outlet.
What the collide signals is more interest than the showroom logistics. NM3 has built much of its public identity around working alone, in one material, with no outside collaborators credited on the object itself. Even when the studio takes on branded work for the likes of Adidas or Off-White, those brands hire NM3’s language rather than co-authoring a specific catalog piece with it. NMAM_CORE is the rarer case: a named outside collaborator sharing top billing on a single, catalogued product, the pairing spelled out directly in the name. That NM3 chose to do it with a daybed rather than a chair or a table also tracks with how each half of the partner works. A daybed is furniture built around rest and proportion rather than mechanism, which suits a pair between a studio obsessed with raw material and a designer whose stated interest is form stripped down to its own logic rather than added onto.
flow
NM3 was founded in Milan in 2020 by two architects, Francesco Zorzi and Nicolò Ornaghi, together with photographer Delfino Sisto Legnani. Zorzi and Ornaghi met as architecture students at Politecnico di Milano, where they and a group of graphic designers first worked together under a different name, Raumplan, on hybrid exhibition design and visual storytelling projects. When that group split off in different directions, Zorzi and Ornaghi kept building furniture and interiors, and Legnani, whose own path had gone into photography rather than architecture, joined them as the third partner. NM3’s own team page now lists Ornaghi as chief executive, Zorzi as chief creative officer, and Legnani as chief communications officer.
The studio leans on two phrases to describe its own work: functionalism as problem solving, and what it calls ordinary abstractness, the idea of extracting something specific out of the strictly ordinary. In practice, that means NM3 works in a single material, stainless steel, shaped through what it terms medium-light metalworking: two-dimensional numerical cutting, bending presses, threading, and dry assembly rather than welding. The studio’s own account of its process treats the resulting surface marks, tonal shifts, and cutting traces as part of each piece’s character rather than flaws to be sanded out, the same language it applies specifically to NMAM_CORE’s expected patina.
By the time NMAM_CORE appeared on Minimalissimo, NM3 had already built a client list well beyond furniture retail, and shown work at venues including Triennale Milano, Milan Design Week’s Alcova section, Salone del Mobile’s The Makers Show, and Ordet Gallery. The studio has designed install and custom work for brands including Adidas, Off-White, Our Legacy, and Moncler, along with cultural clients like Inter Milan’s football club. In the two years since NMAM_CORE, that roster has grown further to include names like Ferrari, Givenchy, and Stone Island, alongside a running series of site-specific installations staged at NM3’s own Milan space. NM3’s range extends past its own furniture line, too. P:S‘s own project archive, the same agency source above, credits the studio with leading creative direction on ABI, a Milan and Cairo stone brand working in Egyptian-sourced granite and marble, and lists NM3 pieces inside NO GA Projects, a furniture collection produced with a Swedish design retailer alongside other designers. The same archive notes a more direct precedent for the kind of shared billing NMAM_CORE represents: a 2025 studio presentation called Material Conversations with Nick Ross, in which NM3 showed its NM25 console in nine finishes alongside a series of wood chairs by Ross, each practice keeping its own name attached to its own object rather than merging into a single joint design the way NMAM_CORE does.
None of that changes what NMAM_CORE was built from. Whatever brand NM3 works for, the studio’s furniture line stays anchored to the same raw steel, the same visible seams, the same refusal to hide how a piece was made.
A modern minimalist daybed with black leather cushions, a polished silver metal frame, and a reflective base, set against a stark white wall and a dark textured floor.
sig
Alexander May’s side of the credit comes from a different discipline. Nilufar, the Milan gallery that represents his work, describes him as a fine artist and creative director working across interiors, furniture, exhibitions, and spatial concepts, based between New York, Los Angeles, and, in Nilufar’s account, Paris. His own studio’s site lists Milan rather than Paris as the third city, a small discrepancy between the two bios worth noting rather than resolving in either direction.
May’s stated approach is a refusal of decoration. Nilufar’s designer page quotes him directly: “Form held by clarity, liberated by imagination.” The rest of his bio there elaborates on the same idea: rather than inventing new shapes, May says he looks for the logic a chair, a table, or a room already contains, then strips away whatever is obscuring it until the object feels bare and, in the gallery’s words, inevitable. Nilufar represents his work through its own collection alongside a broader roster of designers under its Nilufar Edition program.
That restraint has shown up in other collision since NMAM_CORE. Design writer Ali Morris reported that May relocated his practice to New York in 2024, the same year NMAM_CORE went up in Milan, setting up inside 161 Water Street, a 1982 tower designed by Emery Roth & Sons as the original headquarters for insurer AIG. In late 2025, Swiss furniture brand USM partnered with Alexander May Studio on a project called The Architecture of Work, six modular office setups built from USM’s Haller system and photographed in monochrome inside that same building. May described the project at the time as an attempt to let the USM system support clarity of thought and self-definition rather than dictate a fixed layout, with each of the six configurations named for a different way of working, from Collector to Strategist to Archivist. It is a similar move to what NMAM_CORE asked of NM3’s steel: take a system built for one kind of rigor and let a second design voice bend it toward comfort or atmosphere without losing the original logic.
The two practices do not read alike at first glance. NM3 is explicitly industrial, working in raw metal with visible fabrication marks it treats as a badge rather than a flaw. May’s language, at least as Nilufar frames it, sits closer to fine art, concerned with proportion and light rather than material honesty for its own sake. NMAM_CORE lands at the point where those two instincts overlap: a steel frame that behaves like a piece of NM3 furniture, carrying a leather seat proportioned like something May would have signed off on alone.
View this post on Instagram
one
NM3’s own product page lists NMAM_CORE as available upon request rather than at a fixed online price, standard for the studio’s made-to-order catalog. Two U.S. retailers carrying the piece, A+R and Basic.Space, both list it at $14,270, a consistent number for anyone pricing it out through a retail channel rather than ordering directly from Milan.
Lead time through NM3 runs four to six weeks, according to the studio’s own shipping information, with cost varying by destination. Buyers choose between the standard mirror-and-brushed stainless steel combination or request custom material and leather, and NM3’s own materials guide lists a broader set of tailored options beyond that default: zinc-plated iron or supermirror stainless steel for the frame, RAL finishes including black, white, ruby red, capri blue, dark grey, mustard, and bottle green, and upholstery running from indoor and outdoor Nautic fabric in three colorways to pure linen, tortora and blue navy velvet, or leather in matte grey and écru alongside the standard black. The studio’s care instructions ask for a soft cloth and mild, non-abrasive cleaner, warning specifically against scouring pads, acidic products, and aggressive chemicals that would strip the surface faster than ordinary use would.
Two years on, NMAM_CORE has settled into NM3’s catalog as one of its higher-profile pieces without becoming the studio’s signature object the way some of its stools or consoles have. It shows up in retailer listings more often than in press, and its own product page today carries none of the launch-week framing that surrounded its Milan unveiling. What is left is the object as NM3 first described it: a low steel bed built to be used outdoors as easily as indoors, meant to age into its scratches rather than resist them, still carrying two names instead of the one the studio usually puts on its work.
