On the occasion of the Milan Furniture Fair Tom Dixon inaugurates The Manzoni, a place between restaurant and showroom, “where the people can slow down and experience our product in a live setting”, says the British designer and lifestyle brand inventor. “The atmosphere should be sophisticated and a bit moody. It’s a high ceiling space so it will also feel quite airy. Unlike a furniture showroom, it will be alive with the activity of a restaurant, the music of a bar and the smells of our fragrance department”.
The Manzoni will be a permanent location in the heart of Milan, at 5 Manzoni street, with pre-opening on Tuesday 9th of April, the first day of the fair and the Milan Design Week, and it will re-open just after Salone as a permanent restaurant and showroom, scattered with the new furniture collections including Fat, upholstery and comfortable dining chair, high stool and lounge chair, Spring pendant lamps and Opal dimmable led lights translucent globes.
“The Manzoni is a series of events: the entrance bar is full of rich tile patterns by Made a Mano, acting as a backdrop for our new Fat barstool and lounge chair collection. We will host a flower stall and a small Tom Dixon accessories shop. We will serve breakfast coffee and afternoon cocktails, this leads into a long, thin and tall monastic style dining room, minimal and monochromatic in décor, where solid cork tables are complemented by our new Slab stacking chair, and a multitude of Opal lights illuminate the food and the space. At the end of the dining room the open kitchen and after that the jungle, a top lit space full of plants and furniture, some in marble from Testi, gold Mass tables and our new Spring lamp”. Tom Dixon describes it like an unconventional place, “because we are an unconventional design company! We are interested not just in shapes and colours and functionality, but also in smells and tastes and textures”.
Restaurant and showroom, food and design: “The food will be Milanese, the décor international, but as we are active in accessories and tableware, as we do tables and chairs, the links are evident between the food and the furnishing. The style of both will be expressive minimalism”.
According to Mr Dixon, the potential customer will be primarily the Milanese local working community at lunchtime, “we are in the middle of the banking district, in the evening the international traveller that stays in the multitude of hotels in the area, the design aficionados, but also the art crowd and the fashion scene that is so vibrant in Milan at the moment”.
The Manzoni will be the brand’s first mainland European home, followed in the future by others few: “We have appointed a new Head of Italy, Simone Piccolo. We are planning to open others but not so many, we will probably do it in Shanghai at the end of the year, but I think that 5 or 6 around the world will be plenty!”.
