Last December, at the peak of Design Miami—the upstart biannual forum for designers, collectors, and galleries that shadows Art Basel as it shuttles between its Swiss home and Miami Beach—a late-night bacchanal was well underway at the Sunset Island residence of Craig Robins, the 40-something developer and mastermind behind Miami's emerging Design District. Amid pulsing beats, chatter about the relative merits of form and function, and a seemingly bottomless supply of 10 Cane Rum, assorted superdesigners of the moment—Marc Newson, Yves Béhar—snaked through the poolside throng, set upon by publicists, writers, buyers, gallerists, and flat-out fans immortalizing their brushes with greatness in a click or two of their cell-phone cameras, while Kanye West made his way to the buffet tables relatively unnoticed. In the center of it all stood a striking 25-year-old woman in a pale linen dress with a glass of red wine in one hand and a pack of Marlboro Lights in the other: Ambra Medda, Design Miami's director, co-founder, and all-around force of nature.
"It all started in Sardinia with shepherds," Medda said recently, recounting the show's improbable genesis. During a 2004 visit to her ancestral island homeland (her mother, the London design gallerist Giuliana Medda, grew up near Cagliari, and a branch of the famiglia makes Sardinia's noted Argiolas wines), Medda fielded a call on her mobile in the middle of a pasture that green-lighted her audacious, seductively simple plan: What if one event brought together the increasingly incestuous worlds of art and design? In 2006, its second year, Design Miami showcased 19 top galleries from around the world, hosted an exhibition from the Centre Pompidou, drew thousands of visitors to the Design District (home to such outlets as Knoll, Kartell, and Poltrona Frau as well as Miami's Design and Architecture Senior High School), became the epicenter for design's seismic shift from an ethos of mass production toward limited editions, and topped sales of $14 million.
Medda grew up on an island herself—Rhodes—and studied Chinese language and culture at London University (she still travels to China from time to time), following her free-spirit mother from salon to salon, design fair to design fair. "The shows were for decorators or uptown old people," Medda recalls with a wince, watching the sunset from the terrace of her Jean Prouvé– and Gio Ponti–outfitted town house at Aqua, the New Urbanism–inspired Miami Beach community developed by Robins, with whom she happens to share the view. "It was just so dull—an overdose of everything but nothing." She yearned for an event that might elevate, say, a vintage sixties Ettore Sottsass floor lamp, like the one in her dining room, to the level of a Rauschenberg.
