The Brand Edit: design stories you should know

Your latest summer reading has landed. We’ve once again bundled our freshest brand stories from Architonic’s magazine section to optimise your reading experience. So, dive in. Sun lounger and long drink optional.

Our editorial team has been busy telling tales about some of the biggest beasts roaming the Italian design-manufacturing landscape. Cassina, for example, with its history-shaping furniture and lighting pieces, authored by the likes of Le Corbusier, Charlotte Perriand, Gerrit Rietveld, Gio Ponti, and Charles and Ray Eames. ‘In the middle of the desert, waiting for your chauffeur, it is always good to sit on your bag,’ says design legend Philippe Starck of his latest project for Cassina, the sartorially sophisticated Somewhere El-S seating collection.

Find out what the mercurial creative means exactly here. And, while you’re at it, discover Cassina’s specially curated presentation of modernist visionary Charlotte Perriand’s work to commemorate the 20th anniversary of its eponymously named collection, as well as bold new additions to the brand’s portfolio courtesy of Patricia Urquiola, Carlo Scarpa and Barber Osgerby.

Edra, meanwhile, is known in large part for its Compasso-d’Oro-mentioned, landscape-like sofas, but it is rapidly establishing itself as a producer of furniture that pushes aesthetic boundaries via material experimentation. Our latest trio of stories, by Harriet Thorpe for the Tuscan brand reveals how radically new design languages, powered by in-house research, are delivering a series of distinctive outdoor collections.

And, as honours go, to be taken up into Italian manufacturer Minotti’s design roster is quite an accolade, comprising as it does such culturally hard-hitting creatives as Marcio Kogan / Studio MK27, GamFratesi and Nendo. Read Harriet’s report on their 2024 collection, a collaboration with newbies Hannes Peer and Giampiero Tagliaferri.

With all the heat we’re experiencing in Europe right now, you could do a lot worse than get to grips with Made-in-Germany brand Solarlux and their ultra-architectural bi-fold and sliding doors. Julia Hauch examines how the company has successfully been bringing the outside in for over forty years. And for a masterclass in how to connect exteriors with interiors via the use of surface materials, look no further than our recent feature on Twelve Concept – specialists in the production and processing of marble, porcelain slabs, terrazzo and concrete – and their latest project, an Athenian villa. Courtesy of Architonic contributor, Mark C O’Flaherty.

Sticking with surfaces, Mark also authored a fascinating piece on the expertise of Italian manufacturer Casalgrande Padana, whose newest ceramic-material innovation, Marmora, features low-relief veining, a richness of colour and a depth of rarefied sedimentary rock, making it ‘fit for many more purposes than anything from the quarries in Carrara’. And why not take a few minutes to read Barbara Jahn-Rösel on Swiss architecture and design collective atelier öi’s collaboration with equally Swiss parquet experts Bauwerk? The experimental new flooring collection, which goes by the name of Spinpark, is mixing things up geometrically in an intriguing way.

Further editorial offerings over the past few weeks have included Tom Howell’s discussion of Italian furniture specialist Bonaldo’s Executive Space series – ‘a honed, meticulous collection that makes subtle nods to the established structures of the traditional office while embracing the hyper-versatile and unrestricted possibilities of the modern workplace’ – and an updating in the bathroom, too, with Villeroy & Boch’s relaunched Architectura series, which has undergone both a redesign and an expansion. Text by Nils Schellmann.

And let me end on a couple of furniture-focused features. One by Emma Moore on a Bosnian design brand called GoEs, whose traditional carpentry know-how and pioneering wood-shaping technologies have been harnessed by a number of design studios across Europe, eager to push manufacturing boundaries. And the other by Mark C O’Flaherty, where he explores the modular, ‘soft architectural’ sofa system that is Blockbau, fabricated by Italian producer Cantori and comprising a series of lozenge-shaped elements that can be arranged and secured in numerous formations, to create different seating landscapes.

‘My most important goal is to create furnishing items that are elegant and joyful, functional and coordinated,’ says founder Sante Cantori. Amen to that.

© Architonic

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