A carefully choreographed assortment of potted plants is the surprise icing on the cake of this interior in the uber-fashionable ex-industrial back blocks of Milan’s Porta Genova.
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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.
I am liking what Italian designer Rodolfo Dordoni has say about the impact of the global economic downturn on design. In a chat with Wallpaper on the occasion of the opening last month of the new Minotti flagship store in London (Dordoni is creative director), the Milanese architect was upbeat, – and apparently in no mood to mince words either – insisting the financial crunch can only have a positive impact.
“We have gone too far towards show and a type of vulgarity”, he says. “People have been too weak and spoiled and failed to develop their own style, and instead everything and everyone looks the same”. Dordoni is now looking forward to a move towards something more ‘discreet’ and ‘sobre’. ”A change in priorities should result in something less exhibitionist, more sane and tasteful’, he says.
And with all eyes starting to focus on what should be a more streamlined Milan design week in April, it’ll be interesting to see how many of Dordoni’s look-a-likes decide to stay home.
I am captivated this post-industrial Milan courtyard, the forecourt to the abode (and, as I write, temporary retail outlet) of fashion designer Antonio Marras. The unlikely, solitary olive tree (a reference to the stylist’s own Sardenian roots), perfectly proportioned, seems to pin the tiny piazza to the earth in a way the concrete walls do not, or cannot. Guarding like a sentry. A living talisman in a city where good fortune can seem in short supply perhaps? And almost as much as the olive, I love the timber floor. Stitched together from old railway sleepers and, just like the tree, delightfully unexpected.