One of the real pleasures of the Milan Design Week is that you get the chance to see inside places in the city that would usually be closed to you. I went with the fella this year, who in a previous life lived and taught in Milan. He said how nice it was to see the city opened up, with courtyards and grand buildings usually hidden behind closed doors welcoming visitors.

So it was at another of this year’s most-discussed events, the show at Spazio Rossana Orlandi. This rambling warren of rooms and courtyards was once a tile factory and now is an exhibition space and showroom for young designers.

The first place you come to is a sort of glasshouse with a bar, full of people chatting about design and smoking loadsa fags (ah, Europe). Strung from the ceiling were lampshades from PET Lamp, a company that works with Colombian and Chilean crafts people to create shades woven from plastic bottles.

From there I advanced slowly through a series of rooms featuring the elegant – this crockery by Astier de Villatte who have a permanent home there – to the downright WTF. Someone had set up what looked like a windscreen wiper that dipped into a pot of molten rubber and slowly slowly formed it into what seemed to me an entirely pointless crescent shaped block of rubber. Call me a philistine*…

*that’s filisteo in Italian

Upstairs was another crazy space lined floor to ceiling with shoe boxes, showing a variety of stuff, from these distinctive Jaime Hayon saluting bird ornaments, to a plaster cast of the ‘bird’ being flipped inside a snow globe (don’t get me one). By this time, due to the huge crowds and confined space, I was getting a bit annoyed. But I did stop to admire these melded together plates, perfect for the broken crockery club.

In the basement I saw a bed that gently breathed by itself, and a tray which takes the Keith Haring trend to its logical conclusion (below).

By this time I was so strung-out on design that I couldn’t tell what I did and didn’t like any more. Maybe the knob tray was the piece of Milan 2014. Who can say? Not me. Finally I was spat out again into the sunlight of a courtyard where a giant rubber duck nestled in the vines. So there you go. Spazio Rossana Orlandi was a trip. Surreal, silly, overcrowded and inspiring, featuring design that was often purile, mysterious and challenging. I can’t wait to go back next year.