This week we had the pleasure to host and lead the Hong Kong based Studio Ryte founder and architect Dennis Cheung and the designer Whitney Lau through an immersive design companies educational tour in the north-east of Italy.
Studio Ryte is an emerging and talented architecture and design firm comprised of agile and passionate inventers, architects, designers and engineers. The multi-disciplinary design team is dedicated to harness technology and craftsmanship to redefine mundane urban objects, materials and space. In the last few years they designed the interiors of MIT Innovation Node in Hong Kong, Morokok, a vibrant bar and fusion restaurant in the heart of Hong Kong and the PolyU IC, a lab center equipped with a complete collection of engineering facilities, equipment and technologies for hands-on learning and laboratory works.
Besides exterior façade design and interior spatial design, Studio Ryte has worked on several Kickstarter campaigns in the past few years. They also exhibited their furniture series at SaloneSatellite in Milan last two years. Their works were covered by Dezeen, DesignMilk, Core77, Gizmodo, Notcot, SCMP, Perspective, Yahoo and many other design and architecture magazine.
The first visit of the educational design tour was at Battistella Company one of Italy's leading furniture manufacturers, a new comer in the Architectours network, where the marketing Manager Christian Giomo and the Asian Markets Export Manager Giovanni Mariotto welcomed and guided us.
Located in the foothills of the Alps in the province of Treviso, an area famous for its history, natural beauty and the quality of its wines we firstly visited the in-house showrooms of 2 of their 3 brands: Nidi and Cinquanta3 (Novamobili Headquarter Showroom is now in construction)
Nidi is a furniture line designed for the world of children and teenagers, conceived with a conscious approach to design and to the quality of the different materials, capable of creating innovative, stimulating individually tailored rooms where kids can grow and develop their own personality thanks to the use of light, modular forms that are playful and colorful.
Cinquanta3 is a comprehensive furniture system offering entry-level solutions designed for both domestic and public spaces. With the flexibility, vast array of sizes and neutral shades of its various products, Cinquanta3 is perfect for designing living areas, comfortable intimate rooms, versatile well-organized work spaces and common areas designed to encourage relaxation, concentration and dialogue.
Novamobili is their most famous brand nowadaysa furniture project capable of creating elegant, comfortable home interiors, where modular systems are designed to bring together function and aesthetics. Novamobili strives to meet the demands of contemporary lifestyles with its range of clean-lined designs and extensive choice of finishes, stemming from research into materials and texture and its application to interiors.
The company tour continued with the visit of the two factories: from production lines to warehouse automated management the impact offered by the company is awesome. Battistella Company employs cutting-edge technologies that allow it to combine an exceptional level of productivity and quality with precision execution.
Despite advances in technology, attention to detail – a trait typically associated with the artisan tradition – has remained one of the group's key qualities to this day.
After a couple of inspiring hours we had to take the car and continue our design companies educational tour to get the emerging brand Kristalia where Marketing Manager Manuel Da Ros and the Contract Sales Manager Stefano Magagnin were waiting for us.
Designed by Sandro Burigana, Kristalia's headquarters references the factory-villages, and so called ‘farms', that are still found in regions of Italy; while recalling the company's early days as a glass producer, before it transitioned into furniture design. It is architecturally outfitted with a white envelope representative of snow and light, along with expansive glazing that offers panoramic views of the surrounding of trees and mountains, all at once providing a clean, airy environment for creativity, while blending harmoniously with its natural landscape setting.
Kristalia believes in recapitulating the main steps in product phases, making its customers aware of this, convinced that sharing its path will be a guarantee of its value. Thus the product path not only belongs to the company but also becomes part of the most interesting Italian production, of its special features and the reasons why we really believe that this is an example of “Made in Italy” to be preserved.
Kristalia is a good example of what is called “high-end industrial craftsmanship”, since it combines manual skills with standard production, the concept of highly specialised workers with mechanical production, and efficiency with slow production.
Last but not the least we met the Rexa Design Export Manager Davide Furlan and visited the company located in San Quirino, Pordenone, an area immersed in nature at the foot of the mountains.
Much of the company's product line sees the use of the robust and versatile Dupont Corian® and stainless steel, accompanied by wood accents that emphasize its dedication to high-quality materials and technologies. This is evidenced through each of the factory's manufacturing processes which have been roughly broken down into six departments that see specialized experts bringing each product to life.
What sets the company apart from others in the sector is that it has been able to develop a creative process that allows the designers to realize flexible, easily customizable products that can evolve and grow with their clients' needs. The profound knowledge of materials and experience that the company has gained over the years allows it to apply new technologies to the bathroom environment, declining ideas and technical solutions into design projects so that they are complete and open to personalization, and provide the ultimate connection to contemporary living.
Unfortunately the time was over and we had to go back to Treviso where Dennis and Whitney were based during part of their trip in Italy.
Se you next time for another inspiring design companies educational tour through the most interesting and emerging Italian design brands or in one of our architecture educational tour.
Byeeeee!