Our first selection of smart proposals from Fuorisalone

A strong use of pastel colours, the insisted act to forge with natural means the matter, a very interesting row of proposals around porcelain and ceramics. And, then, the intrusion of more languages – with a sparkling, keen and mature attention to build solid fabric catalogues to improve the personalization – on the same furniture: these seem to me the most convincing news (even if not exclusively these…) of the Fuorisalone 2014 among the majority of (very deluding) shows. The Main Fair (Rhò Pero, Salone del Mobile) has been infinitively more convincing, especially those booths dedicated to kitchen and its technologies, of which we’ll speak in another and more detailed post. Buyers seemed more concentrated on the Salone and shortened their presence in town to 3 days. Cabs have been widely available and hotels were not sold out as it happened for instance ten years ago. Even a private apartment rent by its owners during these days can be easily found last minute. Milan, the city that sits beautiful as usual in the middle of Pianura Padana, welcomed all the circle (better, the circus?) of the furniture design industry with a fantastic and uncommon spring. Let’s see what I liked.

Matter and a love contract signed with their long-time clients, a very adequate and touching storytelling are chez either Citizen and Baccarat. The Japanese watch company put on an immersive installation made with the clock’s plaques plus a small exhibition of the most innovative clocks (as the new Fast-ER, that allow you to know always the precise hour thanks to the satellite connection doesn’t matter the latitude in which you need to know what time is it: these clocks are the milestone achievement after the first “radio” clock made by Citizen on 1995).

At Maison&Objet Asia (Singapore, this March), Citizen brought the first plastic clock of its catalogue, powered with solar energy. Today at Triennale (and in the catalogue of the show, Better Starts, a book written not by design critics but by the employees, the voices who build those clocks!) we find the stainless steel version, Smart-ER, that is always on charge when we fit it.

Creative director Marie Yoshida, member of the Brand Head Office, told while she drove me around in the darkened space: “ It is not only a question of advertising us, we are convinced that our product is – as it is conceived and thanks to the innovation history that brings with it along the decades – first of all a lifestyle choice and then a clock. It is the first time we organize this kind of exhibit and we’ve chosen Milano, very interested to its Design Week.

The Triennale of Milan hosts another time Belgium is Design, this time entirely focusing on reflecting surfaces in relation with light (another section is also at Salone Satellite in the main fairground): to discover better the phenomena of the so-called Belgian design, the publisher Luster printed a book in three languages: Belgium’s Best Design; it has been presented alongside the show and we will review it in another post all dedicated to this book.

Baccarat leaves the “fashion quadrilatero” and choses the charity way by renting the Accademia di Brera’s enchanting church of San Carpoforo for its 250^th birthday: a celebrative, opulent and intense exhibit shows all the suites for homes: from crystal glasses in more than one chromatic evolution (above all, the red rubino is mastering) to the table-ware and to lighting by choosing classical and baroque nuances that have been complemented by stone bathtubs and other pieces: so far the Maison abandoned the algid minimalism that signed the former Milanese shows.

Another birthday, another company: Marimekko is at its 50^th since the creation – and the success in sales - of Unikko (a floreal pattern that was not respecting the rules of the company banning so far the flowers for more graphic concepts). The exhibit is populated by a cloud of colourful pillows that – beside the flowers – shows the Spring/Summer Catalogue 2014: red, bands and bullet points are mastering. The show will be on in other cities after the Fuorisalone (the catalogue is fully on display at Jannelli and Volpi Showroom all the year in Italy) where was at Rosssana Orlandi, via Matteo Bandello. Here we have been deluded in finding the same proposals of the last year while the show the gallery offered at Palazzo Valsecchi where they opened up the new pop-up store is much more interesting (Untold, until May 6, is sponsored by Goga Ashkenazi and her fashion company Vionnet, the exhibit design has been assisted also by Marta Sala, former Azucena, who left her brand to work with Orlandi).

Among the young proposals seen at Orlandi’s main space, there is particularly one I liked (it is not new because already presented at London Design Festival): the Alcarol furniture collection made by “bricole” included in transparent resins. Alcarol is the brand of two architects, from Belluno: a couple in life and work, Andrea Forti and Eleonora Dal Farra. Bricole are the wooden pieces used in Venice to perimeter the canals or to moor the boats or to attach the boats pontoons. Their furniture gives birth again to used and reclaimed bricole and gives also the flavour of their lives under the green waters of Venice Lagoon given the suspended effect of the resins over the wood. Prices of the tables range from 7000 Euro and the customization processes are wide and variable. The title of this post is taken by their motto and is a quote of the famous Russian writer Iosif Brodskij, who wrote the seminal Fondamenta degli Incurabili and has been such a great lover of Venice to ask to be buried there.

Changing and colourful patterns, on blowing glass, can be found (until May 16) at the Centre Culturel Francais thanks to the delicious show Le Feu Sacre: it is more thana design exhibit because embodies the know-how of a territory that has been valorised after the industrial desertification. French Meisenthal region was provided by a glass company dating back 1704: it closed for shortage of business on 1969 and now the place hosts the Centre International D’Art Verrier that again switched on the ovens to blow the glass. The shows mixes works by young and more established among artists and designers: from the elegant crystal paperweight by Andreas Brandolini, to the one-off pieces by Ferreol Babin (1987) until my favourite one: System is a portable collection of five planets, signed by the design studio Big Game formed by a French, a Swiss and a German designer, all born between 1978 and 1980: they say about System that it is an object helping us to get used to a new approach toward the world and toward the new (mental) conquests of the space.

A great, prolific cultural immersion on self-production and on its links with manufacturing capabilities and cultural specialities of territories is the show organized by Z33 in collaboration with DaMn Magazine at the wonderful Palazzo Clerici. There young designers (as Formafantasma bringing a collection of horizontal clocks made by lava and volcanic sand, shown in Basel with Libby Sellers) are beside to more classical proposals as the kitchen and bathroom blocks, Islands, by Raw/Edges for Ceasarstone. I’ve been quite touched by Work With Me People III, a performative installation organized by MU (a Dutch gallery) and an artist, Bart Hess, already on show at Dutch Design Week and at the Fashion Biennial in Arnhem: it is the live-creation of a very complicated and futurist texture made of extrusions and stretching of plastics. While they work at their creation, the performers speak via a voice-fader transforming each word in a whisper. Maybe yes, maybe no: who knows if they know to have been the best provocateurs around the overrated word “making” that I widely heard all along this (and the previous) design week. Just to start, they were choosing the non-colour: the total black (the fabric, the dresses) in a white room.

Moroso calls Martino Gamper and he copies with magic and multi-formed benches with the fabric illustrated by a friend artist, Peter MacDonald (they work together because they’re neighbours in London). Already started with Metamorfosi, the collaboration between the Italian artist based in London and the Friuli-based company continues by improving the technological background of the new furniture series Chair Lift: very soft but very stable armchairs made in foam with a rigid inner soul, a consistent weight, the playful colours and the eccentric shapes…The vernissage has been populated of a big crowd all sitting on the benches that have been disseminated in a completely changed showrooms – the walls colours have been stretched off. The Via Pontaccio house in Milan has been completely set as a conversation lounge!

Colours intended not only as shade but also as geometries, volume and movement (this time in tin colours) are starring in three different collections: all are going in the direction of a quite, solid and faithful design. Marco Guazzini shows two new pieces, Façade and Flamingo. The first is a concrete pot in insisting colours with an innovative perimeter: it allows infinite combinations and configurations, also putting this pot beside others of a different family. The second is a kinetic console that is inspired by the form and the colours of the bird giving the name to it (its habitat is in Miami, so that’s why the colours!) and can move according to the user’s needs (drawers/containers are on a rail).

Alfredo (signed by Tagmi) is a kitchen performing table to prepare and to taste new recipes: it is echoing the Italian kitchen tables of the Fifties but recalls that we also need an IPAD place today on our cooking desk.

The new born design editions Clique Smart Matters are an idea of a group of Italian designers (among them Claudio Larquer and Simone Simonelli) who put together two different companies (Odone Marmi and Lilea Design) and the energy of nobles materials (wood, marble) with a technologic one, the valchromat. Beside the elegant colour palette (almost all on the same blue of the brand), every furniture is “electric” and so usable with any portable device. I’ve seen, among the others, chairs equipped with wireless i-phone charger; a table with an abundant row provision and a mobile socket; a bookshelf with integrated Bluetooth speaker, a small kitchen with a tablet dock and induction heart…

I like to end this post, that maybe allows you to look for new proposals in these latter Fuorisalone hours, with what has been signed by two masters, very different for age and style: Marcel Wanders and Francesco Binfarè.

Marcel Wander calles Massimo Listri (1973), one of the most famous interior photographers in Italy, to work in his showroom in Via Savona 56 (open all the year), by offering extra-large visuals (that last year have been signed by Erwin Olaf).

Colour and matter, a great choice in fabrics, egg-shaped and playful forms, sparkling carpets complement the Wander’s work and the ones of other authors as Pot, Zupanc, Studio Job.

Each group of furniture is on show as a small island of living, having as a backstage a Listri’s work picturing sumptuous buildings and museums. Together with his partner Casper Vissers, he bought back from B&B the majority of shares of MOOOI: it has been a great choice because now the company changed shapes and taste and to me it seems it came back to a more aggressive price policy that helps even young people to approach this world. My favourite piece of this new collection is Love Seat, a bench for two that is surrounding the user and is full of pillows also in its white fluffy version. It is like a small and soft nest. If it happens to you to travel to Amsterdam, the Stedelijk Museum hosts the hugest retrospective by Wanders until June 15.

Francesco Binfarè calls his best friends in his beautiful Milan house in Porta Venezia and welcome them together with his life companion (the Biodanza teacher, a poet and a manager of a famous design school, Ms Silvia Signorelli). He choses his old-Milano mansion to host a wooden collection with a philosophic hint: it plays with full and void, he cooly argues on the heart and on the perimeter, on myths and on constellations to put on stage a fine cabinet-making practice, coming from a true love for wood. The private view has been given with a nice dinner on April 10 and the designer himself was telling the story behind each piece (a table with a frame, a cupboard and other pieces, included hundreds of drawings) that was beside the ones he made in the long carrier (all the main Italian companies included Edra and Cassina, of which he has been one of the main managers of the Design Centre, plus all his creations seen at Moma). It is always possible to book another private view by contacting the designer. He will welcome you on a beautiful terrace in full bloom, surrounded by a cascade of wisterias whose persistent smell has been the olfactory tempest of this sunny design week.
 
Do follow our FB and Pinterest pages: all along next week we’ll tell you much more by publishing small updated and images of other interesting design picked up here and there at the Milan Design Week – dozens of other authors than the ones you can already browse in the gallery of this post. We’ll speak about ceramics and porcelain and about some young designers that come from different continents bringing to us their know-how and their techniques: so different, so interesting!