Seeing red: Pedrali launches new campaign

There's been a lot of inside recently.

A friend of mine quipped that after all this lockdown business is over, he's looking forward to a few nice quiet days at home. I laughed. And why not? Humour is needed now more than ever. A balm for the soul.

It's rather fitting, therefore, to see Pedrali – the leading Italian furniture manufacturer that's made an art out of industrial production – launch a campaign that brings the outside in and the inside out. Driven by an exquisitely art-directed, immaculately shot series of photographic images, of the kind we’ve become used to from Pedrali, #PEDRALITALES is strong on storytelling. The grand, eternal themes of home, nature, comfort and beauty are all there, played out in a fascinating dialogue between products and their architectural-spatial context.

The concept was developed by Studio FM Milano, who, in turn, brought on board noted architecture, fashion and advertising photographer Andrea Garuti, as well as Studio Salaris to help with styling. ‘We wanted to bring Pedrali’s products to the fore,’ explains Studio FM Milano creative director Cristiano Bottino, ‘to emphasise their design, their materials, to bring them out of the completely abstracted way in which they had been presented before – which was more of a brand presentation.’

So, out of the photographic studio and into the real world. The location? A landmark piece of architecture called Casa 3000, which was designed by Portuguese office Rebelo de Andrade and located in a sprawling cork forest in the country’s Alentejo region. Made of poor materials, as Bottino puts it, the structure – built primarily using corrugated sheet metal – may function for the very real purpose of private holiday home, but with its emphatically gabled roof and bright-red exterior, there’s more than a touch of the child-like, or even romantic about it.

I suggest to Bottino that it’s almost like an archetype. He describes it as having an oneiric quality to it. ‘It’s like we moved Pedrali’s presentation from Cocteau to Kubrick,’ he says. ‘From the extremely dream-like to something that has a certain amount of abstraction to it, but is nonetheless grounded in reality.’

It’s on this ground, both inside and outside the house, that Andrea Garuti – commissioned for his ‘strong point of view and intimate approach to his work’ – shot a selected number of iconic products from the Pedrali collection. A mere glance at the images tells you immediately that Garuti loves working with light. ‘He turns light into an actor in his images,’ says Bottino, which, in turn, serves to animate the contours and textures of the furniture with which it shares the stage.

The shots taken inside Casa 3000, lightly propped to take the edge off the interior’s stark simplicity, are strongly graphic, while avoiding flatness via a convincing sense of architectural space. Products such as CMP’s super-graphic Jamaica armchair, the Babila table, and Eugeni Quitllet’s polypropylene Remind armchair are featured, along with Basaglia Rota Nodari’s Tamara suspension light.

Lighting in Garuti’s outdoor pictures comes in the form of the Giravolta wireless lamp, where it illuminates CMP Design’s 1960s-nostalgic Tribeca chairs. This is, quite simply, a beautiful shot, with the striking Casa 3000 in the background, internally illuminated. Among the other furniture designs also captured against the vibrant, textural skin of the building are Eugeni Quitllet’s Soul Outdoor armchair and Pio and Tito Toso’s Concrete table. In spite of the exterior setting, Garuti manages in each case to deliver a sense of warmth and intimacy.

How? Well, Bottino’s right. It’s the light that underpins #PEDRALITALES as much as its architectural staging. And who couldn’t do with some of that in their lives right now?

© Architonic