On stage!

For Milano Design City, the showrooms in Milan take on new guises, offering spectacular experiences with installations of great theatrical impact. The standouts: Lea Ceramiche, Marsotto and Jumbo Group

The showrooms in Milan have been transformed – some more than others – to grasp the opportunity of the days of Design City, demonstrating a lively desire to communicate in entertaining and amazing ways. The sites of retail excellence normally devoted to encounters and exchanges of ideas among architects, designers and design lovers, have almost become film sets.

Lea Ceramiche starts from the shop window at Via Durini 3, astonishing visitors and passers-by with the brilliant Anthology Impact installation created by Ferruccio Laviani. A large central meteorite burst in, smashing the streetfront window, while inside an astronaut floats on monoliths made with the new Anthology collection, inviting guests to take a ‘spacewalk.’ An apt set-up to narrate the mixture between the most advanced technologies and the sophisticated aesthetic research that have generated this distinctive solution. Traditional materials like stone and marble blend in a unique proposal, with results that cannot be found in nature. Sophisticated, surprising, with an absolutely original material character, Anthology gives rise to 5 completely different subjects, of strong, absolute personality.

The Anthology Impact, LEA Ceramiche, installazione di Ferruccio Laviani
The Anthology Impact, LEA Ceramiche, installation by Ferruccio Laviani

Marsotto, on the other hand, addresses the most profound emotional aspects of all of us, at Largo Treves 2, opting for the poetic, delicate approach of Nendo: an introspective pathway marked by light lines, balanced spaces, soft lighting, in an unexpected game of perceptions that reveal the care that goes into details of production and styling on the part of the company. Sculptural special effects – like the chair that liquifies in pale marble – express what Costanza Olfi, in charge of marketing, calls “artindustriality,” namely the ability to combine the gestures of master craftsmen with high technology, through intense processes of research on material.

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Marsotto, installation by Nendo. Foto ©Hiroki Tagma.
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Marsotto, installation by Nendo. Foto ©Hiroki Tagma.

Another Nature, the concept of JCP Universe inside the Jumbo Group space on Via Hoepli, is a new perspective on the future. The installation, designed by CTRLZAK, calls attention to the theme of interaction between man and nature, in a historical period when humanity is taking stock of the impact of its actions on the planet. Hence the symbolic pieces of an alternative reality, also designed by CTRLZAK, such as the console-sculpture Agment in steel, studded with pieces of stone – obsidian, labradorite, quartz and lapis lazuli – a paradigm of endless transformation and the infinite cycle of matter. Or the Karst bookcase, created together with Debonademeo Studio, where fragments of volcanic stone separate the shelves, slim sheets of metal that seem to be suspended, in search of balance.

JCP Universe, installazione di CTRLZAK - Photo © Silvio Macchi
JCP Universe, installazione di CTRLZAK – Photo © Silvio Macchi
JCP Universe, installazione di CTRLZAK - Photo © Silvio Macchi
JCP Universe, installazione di CTRLZAK – Photo © Silvio Macchi