This article is part of our Design special report previewing Milan Design Week.

Three things Phil America and Jenny D. Pham never imagined they’d be doing as recently as five years ago: running a design company together, living together and living in Milan.

In the prepandemic days of 2019, the (aptly) American-born Mr. America, now 41, and the German-born but (mostly) American-raised Ms. Pham, 43, were flitting between Europe, Asia and the United States, he pursuing a career as an artist and she as a communications director for international fashion brands.

“We were friends for years,” said Mr. America — though they saw each other only in Los Angeles, his home base for a time and the place where her parents happened to be living. Then things changed. “The friendship slowly became a relationship,” he said. “And the relationship slowly became a business.”

How that relationship, and that business, evolved — and how both of them ended up in Italy’s capital of style — is part of a larger story, the next chapter of which is unfolding during Milan’s annual design week.

In the middle of the ever hectic Salone del Mobile, Ms. Pham and Mr. America’s two-year-old company, Objects Are By, will be staging a vernissage around their inaugural collection, complemented by a new project just added to the lineup. The launch event, like much of the work appearing in it, speaks to the couple’s strong feelings for their adoptive city, as well as a desire to capitalize on its restless creative energy.

“Milan has really served as such a huge inspiration for us,” Ms. Pham said. “We’ve built such an exciting community here, in fashion and art and music. And we thought, wouldn’t it be fun to work with our friends?”

Their timing is opportune. While Milan has always drawn professional aesthetes, there is some evidence of a post–Covid uptick in the number of globe-trotting artists and designers making the city a regular perch in their transcontinental migrations.

“I’m seeing a lot of Americans,” said Timothy Small. Mr. Small, who is Milan born and bred and a sometime New Yorker, is the former chief editor of Esquire Italia magazine. He now works as a creative director at FSB Group, a branding agency in Milan, which he said was feeling “more like a creative hub” in recent years. He pointed to Brexit and London’s consequent decline in design stature as a contributing factor.

Salone del Mobile itself has had a substantial increase in the number of Americans participating in recent years. According to fair organizers, the number of Americans in the furniture business attending jumped from barely 3,000 in 2019 to over 6,000 last year.

And there are indications that the Fuori Salone — the parties and previews in Milan proper — are growing in popularity with the itinerant glamour set, especially those who favor gatherings like Art Basel and South by Southwest.

“Salone is a lot more immersive,” said Beverly Nguyen, a Manhattan stylist and housewares entrepreneur who will be hosting her own party — her first during Milan Design Week — a day before and a few blocks away from Ms. Pham and Mr. America’s.

At the time the Objects Are By duo formally coupled up, Ms. Pham was living in Milan, working for Versace; Mr. America decided to join her there, arriving in 2021. Almost immediately, they began to feel the influence of their new milieu and the allure of its most famous cultural commodity.

“Design was very top-of-mind,” Ms. Pham said. “We were furnishing our home, and it just kind of emerged from there.”

The more they came to know the city, and the more of its entrepreneurial spark they absorbed, the more potential they saw to make Milan a muse and a showcase, establishing a platform there for global talent. After two years and “a very long conversation,” as Ms. Pham described it, the pair committed to their new endeavor full time.

In their initial collection, called Season One and officially unveiled in February, they featured two product lines, one designed by Mr. America and one by a friend and erstwhile Los Angeles neighbor, Elena Flores.

Mr. America’s work reflected his obsession with the Milanese streetscape: Milan Metro consists of 10 vases, trays and other ceramic vessels, inspired by the forms and palette of the Franco Albini- and Franca Helg-designed subway system. (“I ride it every day,” Mr. America said. “Just like in New York.”)

Ms. Flores’s contribution, The Internet, is a series of woven blankets; she arrived at their beguiling starlike patterns by feeding prompts into artificial intelligence software to produce an image of “what the internet would look like if it was a palace,” she said.

For Ms. Flores, the opportunity to work alongside trusted friends and with no real constraints was made all the more appealing by the chance to establish a foothold in a European design mecca.

“It’s great the way Phil and Jenny have created this sort of space that connects artists and designers to that world,” she said.

Similar ingredients — Metro-inspired colors, oddball geometries, a fascination with the idea of place, however vaguely construed — informed the next Objects Are By collection, which is being introduced during Design Week.

“I think Phil wanted to take something very typical from my work, but use it in a more subtle way,” said the Swiss fashion designer known as Babybrush, who designed it. His contribution, called Zurich Vision, is a set of cups, plates and saucers traced with delicate motifs slightly suggestive of racecar flames, but he said it was drawn from the international street-art and tattoo scene that captivated him growing up in the (to him) all-too-pristine city of Zurich.

“I did a lot of graffiti in my young age,” he said.

Even for seasoned natives and design pros, stepping out on the Milan Design Week stage is a daring move, subject to vicious expenses and judgments. For the Objects Are By expatriate neophytes, it represents what the Italians would call a salto mortale: deadly jump.

“It can be intimidating,” said Johanna Grawunder, an architect who arrived in Milan in the mid-1980s to work for the Memphis Group founder Ettore Sottsass and maintains a studio in the city today.

In Milan, then as now, a generation of groundbreaking Italian designers like Mr. Sottsass set the standard. But Ms. Grawunder said the city could also be welcoming to the energetic aspirant: “It’s very open to anything new,” she said. “You just have to feel the spirit.”

For now at least, Ms. Pham and Mr. America seem to be feeling it, even as they’re still feeling their way around.

“Some people are like, ‘Oh, Milan, isn’t it sort of ugly?’” Mr. America said. “But you find these secrets here.” Many of the city’s best features lurk in places waiting to be discovered rather than flaunting themselves in open piazzas. “It’s not just the Duomo,” he said.