The new space in Manhattan of Italian Design Brands, in the middle of NoMad (192 Lexington Avenue), the main location for design in New York, offers full immersion in the creative poetics of Andrea Parisio, art director of Meridiani, who has approached the space as a monochrome showcase, steeped in elegance and stylistic purity. On the two levels, visitors can discover the unique quality of the Meridiani collections, the poetry of light with Davide Groppi, and the spaces for the offices of Italian Design Brands (IDB) USA.
“The flagship store is a new chapter in the history of Meridiani – says Andrea Parisio – and an indicator of how Italian design can speak an international language. The brand expresses its future without forgetting its roots, making the new collections establish dialogue with iconic creations, with a particular accent on fabrics and materials. The store has been designed to exploit the full depth of the building, offering a wide view from the entrance that is enhanced by a monochrome palette of surfaces, with shades of white and ivory, surrounding the various spatial interpretations.”
Six different areas invite guests to explore Meridiani’s vision of beauty, narrated by exclusive products like the Plinto table, the Oscar sofa, the Emilia chairs, and by the wide-ranging materials library in which to explore fabrics and materials for tailor-made solutions.
In constant pursuit of sensory stimulation and emotion, the “Experience Space” of Davide Groppi embodies the poetics of a designer, founder of the brand that bears his name, who is driven by the various manifestations of light, in a subtle game of full and empty zones. “Starting from the three fundamental vowels of our alphabet, with Nulla, Infinito and Pablo – which are also the point, the line and the plane – we arrive at all the other letters, extensions of the original trio. From the outset, all my projects are the expression of five essential ingredients: simplicity, lightness, emotion, invention and amazement,” the designer-entrepreneur explains.
Groppi has a particular bond with this city: “I’ve always been fascinated by New York, above all for the sense of freedom it transmits. Every time I visit, I go back home inspired, contaminated by this metropolitan sensation of life, art, music, culture. I have dreamt of opening a store in New York ever since I began, and today I’m here in Manhattan to turn on the lights of our first Spazio Esperienze in the city, with the same thrill as when you unveil something new, the same sensation of still having to discover many things, but on the other side of the world.”
For the opening, in Manhattan we met up with the other protagonists of this extraordinary adventure: in a wide-ranging dialogue, Andrea Sasso, President and CEO of Italian Design Brands, explains the mission of the IDB group, “founded in 2015 with the aim of creating a major hub of interaction for Italian industrial companies and small-medium businesses in the field of premium quality design. In 2015, the first company to take part was Gervasoni, and today we can count on 14 brands – including Saba Italia, Axolight, Cubo Design – in the sectors of furnishings, lighting, kitchen systems and custom-made projects.”
“Our growth has been decidedly strong this year, and we are also listed on the Milan Bourse,” Sasso continues. “We act as accelerators for our brands, but we keep the DNA, heritage, value and legacy of every company intact: the Italian history of craftsmanship and creativity is a vivid presence in every brand of the group, and we are helping them with all the operations that would be difficult to carry out on their own. The construction of an affiliate, for example, is not easy for a small business, and in the moment when we decided to make this investment in New York, two of our trademarks – Meridiani and Davide Groppi – have agreed to invest in the creation of their showroom. The second floor, on the other hand, is for the offices of IDB directed by Renato Delle Side with a team of ten people, cultural promoters of all our other companies.”
The US market is undoubtedly very important, and pays close attention to the values of design Made in Italy, says Delle Side, CEO: “We have worked hard on this strategic plan of expansion: when you arrive on a different market, it is necessary to understand it and to respect it. Perhaps it was less complicated some years ago, but today there are not as many distributors, operative costs are unaffordable, and brands encounter more obstacles. Gruppo IDB is able to come to grips with these problems, supporting our brands within different strategies: brands that were already present and well-known on the American market, distributed by dealers in this sector.”
“The force of the group is synergy – Andrea Sasso adds – and the ability to truly put it into practice. Thanks to our companies and the diversification of creative and productive sectors, we are able to offer a complete project in both residential and contract applications, for restaurants, hotels, auditoriums, private homes, real estate developments… And the new flagship has been conceived as a creative hub in which to welcome and gather ‘specifiers,’ to inspire them and guide them in the creation of a personalized, customized living space.”
“I have attempted to create a linear location that could contain the various specificities of Meridiani,” says Andrea Parisio. “Our brand does not set out to impose a precise style or taste, a single color or a single idea. It tries to follow and interpret the aesthetic sensibilities of the client. We might define Meridiani as a chameleonic and metamorphic company: every time we change the displays, we profoundly modify the space. The collection is large and versatile, in terms of number of products and the vast range of materials, fabrics, lacquers, metals, wood varieties, to be shaped with mastery. Furnishings that are tailor-made, and can be perceived as the natural extension of a person’s own sensorial world.”
Investigating the emotional sphere, the Experience Space of Davide Groppi is “a project that began ten years ago, with the idea of offering people a direct exploration of our world,” Groppi says, to conclude this choral conversation. “The initial idea is to create places in which to have a shopping experience, while at the same time delving into the values that lie behind our entire poetics, entering the aesthetic aspects and meanings of our creations, the semantics of lamps conceived as narrative instruments, as the letters of an alphabet we utilize to construct anagrams, words and then stories, which are our projects of light. An experiential location to discover how light can be manifested in a more conceptual way. This has been our challenge: to be able to narrate our world in very small but very powerful spaces.”
