Looking beyond is the concept of the new Marazzi showroom… What does it mean for you?
Looking beyond is what Marazzi is preparing to do in the present and future: we are used to communicating a product in human heights and dimensions and sometimes even smaller. Looking with new perspectives and above all lifting up our eyes allows us to see things beyond our everyday lives and offers us new sensations and information. You only need to walk around the city and look up to observe new façades of buildings, views of the sky: details that we never see. It is an opening to new perspectives that are still unknown to us, a new opportunity to experience new environments and to identify with new atmospheres. Looking straight ahead prevents us from understanding everything that happens above us and is often outside our ‘visual’ range.
The showrooms require more and more content and diversification, what scenarios do you envisage in this regard?
Overlapping communication, new feelings and emotions, images, energy, touch, smells and music. These are the main concepts around which the exhibition spaces will be always more organized. We are increasingly in need of new ideas to fuel our creativity and react accordingly when something is proposed to us. The future exhibition space will be very interactive: it will be a bilateral connection from which we receive information and to which we in turn will provide information and content. We will work with a huge database that continually updates itself, changing solutions and proposals that may be increasingly more subjective and personalized.
Retail, contract, ephemeral architecture and residential: the boundaries between these areas seem increasingly narrow. What are your thoughts about the contamination between different areas?
These objectives have different names but are very similar to our lifestyle. The key words are ‘emotional well-being’ which is exactly what we want in a store, in our home, in an airport or when visiting the ephemeral space of a temporary exhibition. The aim is to immerse ourselves in areas where we can find a benefit for our quality of life. Different areas for commercial strategies, but very similar objectives, which may regard a single person, a small group of people or entire communities. Diversification lies not so much in what you want to achieve, but in the language with which you target different customers.
Do you see significant changes in the way finishes are chosen for residential projects?
Yes, definitely, as a result of the speed of globalized communication. The mood of living and emotional well-being travels via the web around the world at the same rate in central India as in NYC. This has brought very different worlds incredibly close together: there has been a great exchange of habits and social realities, which had previously remained intact and have now become mixed with external ingredients. Fusion has happened and it is increasingly becoming our new way of life, impacting on food, clothing, appearances and much more. Think of our eating habits that have been enhanced by many ingredients that until a few years ago were unthinkable, our tongues that are becoming richer with the words of languages different from our own, images of distant countries that we can now very easily reach and much more. In this scenario, for example, the detail of the floor of our house, the colours, new materials, methods of using products and much more travels in real time all over the known world and is shared through images and sensations that simultaneously make it a wealth of exponential content.
