Enter Cleaf’s Shaping Surfaces 2021 competition

Just 20 km from Bergamo – a city that was one of the first Covid-19 hotspots in Europe – lie the headquarters of Cleaf, a family business founded in 1975, which has, since then, gone from trading company to manufacturer in its own right. With the acquisition of a panel implantation facility in the early 1990s, Cleaf started experimenting with coating surfaces and the endless possibilities offered by these materials. Today, the company employs over 250 people and manages four production facilities in the area.

Despite the company’s continuous growth and solid status in the panel surface industry, the people behind Cleaf insist on remaining open and responsive, both in their general approach and as a way of learning and evolving: ‘I have always looked up to those more talented and bigger than myself. I have done better than some people while others have risen far beyond my reach. Cleaf is a team that always aims for excellence, a place where people work well together and continue to dream’, says Luciano Caspani, co-founder and president.

In pursuit of this, during the spring of 2020, they asked themselves how they could support their partners in the best way possible and found the answer by simply asking the partners directly. A survey was immediately rolled out and sent to all distributors around the world, asking what they required most from them during the period of the pandemic. The response was unambiguous: more digital activity. By June, Cleaf had set the Shaping Surfaces Competition in motion, a digital competition platform with its own independent website and a lively level of Instagram activity #shapingsurfaces.

‘The aim of the Shaping Surfaces competition is to improve the creativity of architects and interior designers through the use of our surfaces and to create a debate around interior spaces,’ says Roberto Caspani, CEO and second generation in the family business. Boasting a multidisciplinary jury spanning the design sector, it was not long before the campaign started to reach a wide audience of professionals and competition entries started to roll in.

Among numerous impressive submissions, one project stood out for its playfulness and surprising conception of space and colour, the Banema Studio concept store. Lisbon-based architecture studio, Campos Costa Arquitetos won the competition with an interior composed solely of one strong colour – a striking blue-green turquoise – shaping the room with geometric formations of built-in furniture. An installation that sends one back to an era of exquisite and full-blown art deco interiors yet exuding a contemporary feel with its elementary structures and rigorous material choice.

‘We work with the senses, and not just the visual one. Of course, colour is an important visual aspect, but so are sound and smell, they all contribute to defining the complete ambience’, says architect Pedro Campos Costa, ‘For the Banema Studio, we chose to work with Cleaf panels as they were a natural answer to the type of environment we wanted to create. Geometry is definitely an important aspect for us, form is pleasure, form is the final stage, form is the result of a process that is layered with a lot of conditions and requests. In this case, the furniture is more like an organiser, a display that creates space, and the versatility of the Cleaf panels made it easy to work with.’

For Cleaf, this intensified digital engagement resulting from the competition has opened up an additional new way of communicating with both architects and distributors. By listening closely to their needs and input, Cleaf has been able to evolve creatively. Crisis creates opportunity, as they say.

© Architonic