Archives for the month of: April, 2009

There’s something wonderful about this credenza by Alessandra Baldereschi.  One in a series of ‘four seasons’, this is summer.  Last year in Umbria I met a young artisan who made cabinets and armoires very similar to this one in the traditional manner, the way his father and grandfather before him had done.  He was looking for a new angle.  Something distinctive to grow his market while staying true to artisanal values. Baldereschi must have been listening.  

The console is one of 50 new pieces from the just-minted first collection of Italy’s youngest design brand, Skitsch.  Meaning the opposite of kitsch in Italian, Skitsch is the love child of ex B & B Italia/Mooi mover and shaker Renato Presi and design maven (and Skitsch creative director) Cristina Morozzi.  The brand refuses to be defined by any style tag, preferring instead to cultivate a deliberately mixed stable of young and established, mainly Italian designers, all lovingly encouraged to do their own thing.

Skitsch has just opened in grand style in Via Monte di Pieta’ 11, downtown Milan, to coincide with il Salone del Mobile.  And with profile and pedigree to outdo any design start-up on the planet, we certainly won’t be the only ones keeping an eye out.

Just as I decided to post about Front‘s softly, softly twist on conventional furniture decoration for Porro, I stumbled across the work of their Dutch soul mates, Scholten and Baijings.  The duo is presenting fuori salone in Milan, alongside a bevy of new Dutch talent at the Romeo Gigli Cafe’/Design Academy Eindhoven HQ in the Porta Genova precinct. Their exhibition, Truly Dutch, Conversation Pieces for the Interior, is a five-piece collection of  ”contemporary, decorated pieces of furniture, designed by Scholten & Bangs and made by artists and master craftsmen.”  The pieces were inspired by classic master works from the intriguingly divergent collection of the  Zuiderzee Museum of art, design and culture.  The tuna boat motif travel case for me kind of says it all about Dutch design at the moment.  You may not quite get what’s really going on, but it makes you look.

Front‘s new Black & White storage range for Italian design house Porro (directed by Piero Lissoni) plays with the softening effect of wavy, hand-made look lines on rigid, conventional furniture forms.  The all-girl Swedish design ensemble want to create for ‘people who have not forgotten emotion in furnishing’.  Even (or maybe especially) if it’s furniture for the workplace.  I like Lissoni’s view of the world and Front’s is a direction that slots right in with Porro’s bigger vision for more sensual, emotional work spaces, with technology taking a step back.  Sounds good.

If you’re in Milan any time soon, the Porro take on office furniture is now on show at their showroom at Via Durini, 15.

I love British firm SCP’s take on the democratic design push (led by Ikea in their first outing at Milan design week) being felt everywhere in 2009.  The SCP Boxed Collection will launch in Milan this week. Guest designers were all briefed to create accessibly priced products, small enough to be carried home under the customer’s arm.  Konstantin Grcic’s height-adjustable Tom Tom and Tam Tam tables, the cute as a button Ulrik, a timber stool in two halves by Alex Hellum, and Sum wall storge by Peter Marigold are my instant favourites, with Sum being perhaps the most democratic piece in the range.  Three per pack, the shelves are infinitely modular making it the sort of furniture you can buy and grow at your own pace.

Ever since my first time at I Saloni one year ago, Milan has been at the centre of my design radar like never before.  It’s hard to describe but, the travails and pleasures of the city in design week (seriously silly hotel bills, sardine style tube rides and a drenching last day of rain included) seem to have morphed into an unswerving loyalty to Italy’s second biggest metropolis.  I feel like I’ve joined a very special club. 

Milan design week 2009 starts today and I wish with all my heart I were there.  To those of you who can be, enjoy, appreciate  - and don’t forget to pack your umbrella.

The smart and sophisticated Tati lamp by Ferruccio Laviani debuts at Il Salone del Mobile, Milano in a few days.  The big event starts on April 22 and, as the previews stream through the inbox, this lamp with its air of a classic in the making continues to stand out. At its best in white or black, the look and feel of the lamp changes according to the selected diffuser.  Kartell will launch Tati alongside two other (very different!) lamps by Laviani among others as part of the Kartell Marathon Fuorisalone at their flagship store in via Turati.

Big parquetry, big pattern, big colour.  But this idiosyncratic restoration of an art nouveau apartment fallen on hard times by architectural duo Than & Videgard Hansson is remarkable for much more than its controversial good looks. The architects may have shunned the international zeitgeist in favour of a localized, artisan-inspired bespoke, but the result is much more progressive poetic than provincial.

photos: Than & Videgard Hansson via designboom

Melbourne lighting innovators Mance offers its Slim light in 153 colours.  I like the idea of randomly bunching the tubes, a little like a floating game of pick-up-sticks.  Or for a more elegant feel, simply hang vertically.  I’d say the hardest thing about using Slim is choosing the colour.

In an effort to kickstart the building sector, the Italian government is relaxing planning laws and encouraging its mainly apartment-dwelling populus to add a new room or two.   Not the worst idea in the world granted, but with  Prime Minister Berlusconi content to trust matters of design and aesthetics to the ‘good taste of the Italian people’, it did not take long for Piano Casa to raise the ire of architects and planners all over, including that of the venerable Massimiliano Fuksas.

So with all this in mind, the roof top ‘residential containers’ concept by Czech architects HSH seems like it might be a step in the right direction.  The outside of the containers is left in the original rough steel finish – a deliberate ploy designed to neutralise the contrast with the architecture of the host building below.  Interiors of course need suffer no such identity crisis.  And, best of all, windows are simply cut in as required to frame the view.


It’s the turn of Euroluce at I Saloni 2009.  So as excitment builds and  the focus in Milano shifts from kitchens and bathrooms to (some some beautifully restrained) lighting, here’s my shortform collection of the most eye-catching online previews so far…  

A new emphasis on classic, vaguely retro forms seems a theme running through much of the lighting (especially pendants) debuting in Milan.  Personal favourites include, from the top down, Naoto Fukasawa‘s ‘bucket’ and ‘dome’ for Panasonic Electric Works; ‘Top’ by first time product designers Swedish architectural duo Tham & Videgard Hansson Italian company Zero; and ‘Rem’ by Spanish design studio Yonoh for Almerich.  Milan design week and Euroluce open on April 22.

Naoto Fugasawa, Bucket pendant