Centre Stage: Pedrali at the Salone del Mobile 2017

“All the world’s a stage,” wrote Shakespeare. Indeed, if you were at the Salone del Mobile in Milan last week, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the entire international design world and then some had entered stage left. The fair itself was bigger than ever. And with an even greater raft of events extra muros, all vying to secure an audience.

For some, Milan is a comedy. The best opportunity in the trade calendar to reconnect – often by chance – with those industry-wide contacts, both professionally and socially (and, of course, to indulge in some good food and fine wine). For others, it’s more of a tragedy, the fair’s behemothic scale making making it difficult for meaningful, in-depth conversation to take place. Love it or hate it, however, the Salone del Mobile can’t be ignored.

A key way, of course, to ensure that your voice is heard amid the cacophony is – as any good acting coach would say – to project. Clarity of brand messaging combined with an expressive, architecturally considered fair stand, strong on concept and visitor experience, is how premium Italian furniture brand Pedrali stood out from the crowd at this year’s Salone.

The manufacturer presented a highly polished and thoughtful stand – designed by Milan-based multidisciplinary studio CalviBrambilla – entitled ‘Solid Geometry’, where, operating on one level as metaphor for the solidity of both the company’s product offering and its business, large geometric volumes, like actors upon a stage, defined the space.

In turn, each of these elements also functioned as a plinth-cum-tableau, a small mise-en-scène presenting a new product collection, aided by graphic cues that delivered a mini-narrative on the physical context of their application: by the pool in a sun-soaked California; a stylised British landscape, replete with castle in the distance; a cactus-filled sunset scene, down Mexico way…

It may be 400 years since the death of Shakespeare, but the Bard’s voice could be detected in the form of Cazzaniga Mandelli Pagliarulo’s new Nym collection, which revisits and reworks the iconic typology of the traditional, spindle-backed English Windsor chair. Its name a clever reference to the character of Corporal Nym from “The Merry Wives of Windsor”, the design’s ash-wood construction – Pedrali’s first chair made entirely of solid wood – belies its surprising lightness; Nym weighs just over 4 kilograms, thanks both to the Lombardy-based design trio’s commitment to material reduction and the manufacturer’s industrial production technologies.

The curved backrest of the chair – traditionally circular in section – has been displaced by one with a flatter, elliptical section, meaning less material usage and, importantly, greater comfort. (Anyone who has sat in an open-backed wooden chair with a round backrest will appreciate this.)

“It’s always a challenge to do a new interpretation of a recognisable, iconic chair,” says Michele Cazzaniga. “The Windsor chair has a long history to it. It was almost like a competition to see how we could apply all the new technologies of Pedrali to it, such as CNC-milling, machine-steam-bending and water-based finishing.” The result is a design that, also available in an armchair version, is at home, so to speak, within the home as well as in contract settings. A range of seat bases (ash legs, slender steel rod, swivel with automatic return), as well as optional seat upholstery complete the performance.

There was more than a little nod to California dreaming in the Milan staging of Patrick Jouin’s new outdoor furniture collection for Pedrali. Called Reva (get it?), the celebrated French designer’s new three-seater sofa, lounge armchair and sun lounger were presented in a stylised, Hockney-esque, poolside setting. As products for exterior spaces that read almost as indoor furniture, the Reva family displays a happy tension between the maximal and the minimal: generously sized seating, richly upholstered, appears almost to float, thanks to the optical lightness of the architectural, extruded-aluminium frames and recessed, tapered legs that support it.

“The outside has become a part of the house,” explains Jouin, “because we all have a strong need in us to breathe. There’s just a piece of glass separating both spaces. So the idea was take the comfort of the interior and put it outside.” With seat bases and backs that flex with the user as they shift position, moveable cushions, and the ability to convert the sun lounger into a sofa, the emphasis is clearly on comfort and adaptability. “The sun moves all the time. You want to be able to move with it.”

Jouin sees in Reva the potential for it to be developed into a much larger system, drawing on Pedrali’s impressively broad industrial-manufacturing know-how. “They have no fear of investing in a mould, new tooling or a new technology even. They’re experts in many materials, including, for over a decade now, wood. Pedrali is very flexible, giving you as a designer many possibilities, which is rare. This is real industrial design. Not just design.”

This is merely the end of Act One.

© Architonic