Fantoni group

The international panel of 21st Premio Compasso d’Oro ADI awarded the Compasso d’Oro special mention to Flora collection.The most important and prestigious Design Prize was presented on 26th June last, in Turin, in the fabolous frame of the Reggia di Venaria Reale and was followed by a visit to  the exhibition “L’Oro del Design Italiano, la Collezione del Compasso d’Oro nella Scuderia Juvarriana”. The exhibition comprises the complete historic collection of the Premio, including the Stripes collection designed by Marco Viola, which won Fantoni the special mention some years ago.The ceremony was one of the most relevant events of the programme  which is under course in Turin – World Design Capital 2008 – and includes also the World Congress of Architecture. Flora Collection - designed by Fabio Flora, a young designer who got in touch with Fantoni thanks to one of the many workshops organized by the Fantoni Research Centre in co-operation with the Politecnico of Milan and who showed immediately a refined sensitiveness for the project - shows the will to change the traditional image of the orthogonal grid-based office, to break the traditional geometries with sharp signs, with slanting millings that draw crossings and perspectives. It represents the courage to go further the tradition while keeping to the essential nature of the aesthetics that has always been a feature of Fantoni’s design, to be outside the norms which always means something, beyond the trends of the moment and attentive to the needs of the user.

A revolutionary project from the aesthetical point of view, the pursuit of functionality and freedom of composition fits well in the Fantoni tradition. There then the slanting milling is not merely an aesthetic detail but becomes a handle. The millings on the fronts follow two routes, one that fits on the low cabinets and the other on the high ones, thus creating drawings that run throughout the whole surface and allow to realize compositions with two or three elements one by the other. This is a project meant for a customer who wants to experience new sensations, interested in some way in a mixture with forms of artistic expression.

Flora is absolute also in the choice of colours: red, black and white, primitive colours, ancestral shades to more deeply highlight signs and volumes.

The main element of the project, the work top, though a discreet presence, represents a junction element between the cabinets. Pure with its essential lines, it is proposed in two versions – with a frame that can be placed in correspondence with the edge of the top or more on the inside of it to allow the assembling of a drawer box beside the side panel.

Aesthetics and technology are pleasantly combined together: tops, doors, drawers and desk tops are made with MDF panels lacquered with polyurethane  varnishes and “soft touch” surface treatment, while the metal parts are lacquered with epoxy powders.

Flora is a project spurred by the belief that the interior design has a definite influence on the engagement and the creativity of the user and is the result of a synthesis and interaction of all the protagonists, the aspects and the moments of the project. This a subject widely discussed also during the workshops organized by the Research Centre that, together with the designers involved experiences new ideas, taking up the challenge issued by the work world in the constant pursuit of the total well-being that has become the strong point of Fantoni’s philosophy.