Sam Baron on Fabrica’s Extra-Ordinary Gallery Collection

When we found out that Fabrica, the Italian design studio and research center, had just launched its striking new Extra-Ordinary Gallery collection in its online shop earlier this month, the pieces were so intriguing and beautiful that we thought we'd struck editorial gold — turns out we weren't the only ones! The collection has been all over the design blogs in the past two weeks, and deservedly so. Yet we couldn't pass up the chance to share it with our readers anyway, so we got in touch with our old friend Sam Baron, creative director of Fabrica's design department, and asked him for some special insight into the collection, which he curated. The result is a fun little personal diary, featuring five of the line's standouts as they relate to Baron's daily routine.

12.18.12

Sighted

Benetton: The Art of Knit

Tourists emerging from the Broadway/Lafayette subway station in New York’s Soho were in for a shock this fall: Perched atop an old garage behind the BP gas station were two life-sized mannequins, clad in knitted wool and engaged in a rather un-family friendly act. (New Yorkers, used to such things, weren’t particularly fazed.) The artwork was part of the Lana Sutra series by Fabrica artist-in-residence Erik Ravelo, and it was commissioned for a Benetton pop-up shop that opened in the space this past September and closes at the end of this month. But once you stepped inside the 2,200-square-foot garage, you realized that though the knit sculptures were the attention-grabbers, the space was actually full to the brim with ingenious objects that offered clever takes on color and wool, created by the young talents at Fabrica — Benetton’s Treviso, Italy–based designer-in-residence program — under the creative direction of Fabrica’s design head Sam Baron and Benetton’s brand-new creative director You Nguyen. “The concept was to adapt Benetton’s DNA to a more modern vision,” says Baron.

10.18.12

Studio Visit

Sam Orlando Miller, Le Marche, Italy

We talk a lot on this site about inspiration, and with most of our subjects that conversation assumes a certain measure of materiality — that we’ll be discussing the things they’ve amassed over the years or the places they return to over and over again on their travels. But for the British artist Sam Orlando Miller, it’s the lack of these things that gives him the energy and space to create. In 2000, after spending more than a decade in London building up his interiors firm, Miller and his wife, Helen, left it all behind for a quiet life in the Le Marche region of Italy, a mile from the nearest village, close to the coastline of the Adriatic Sea. But though they live in an admittedly enviable location, Miller says, “it didn’t need to be Italy. It just needed to be somewhere that was wilder than London, away from the culture I’d been immersed in. I found it difficult to think when surrounded by all that stuff. Here, you have to think about your own creativity and what your voice is. When you’re surrounded by nature, all of a sudden you’re on your own, psychologically.” And so rather than things, Miller collects thoughts and sketches and conversations, running over them again and again in his head until one bumps into the other and becomes a full-fledged idea. That’s what happened with his most recent body of work, The Sky Blue Series — a collection of mirrors and objects commissioned by the San Francisco gallery Hedge for a solo show, on view until this coming Monday, that marks Miller’s American debut.

03.16.12

Where They've Been

Adam Štěch of Okolo’s Italian Architecture Tour

When Adam Štěch goes on location for Okolo, the Prague-based design blog and magazine he founded with his brother Jakub and graphic designer Matěj Činčera three years ago, he likes to picture himself as a National Geographic reporter. Okolo’s recent Vienna Only issue, for example, became a kind of urban hunting expedition through the wilds of the Austrian capital, while legitimate business trips — like attending the Milan Furniture Fair as an editor for the Prague interiors magazine Dolce Vita — are rife with opportunities for fieldwork. After “cruising around crowded Zona Tortona in the center of design hell,” as the 25-year-old puts it, he’ll often spend a day or two searching out amazing examples of indigenous architecture to document. One such recent excursion to Lake Como entailed a curious encounter with the locals: “We were looking for an Ico Parisi house, for which I knew the district but not the exact address, and there was a single old man walking nearby,” recalls Štěch. “I approached him on a whim, explaining who Parisi was and asking if he knew the house. He picked us up with his car and dropped us off directly in front of it. I love those kinds of stories.” We love them too, which is why we asked Štěch to put together this slideshow sharing some of his favorite moments from his travels in the past few years.

06.14.10

Factory Tour

Mattiazzi's Udine Headquarters

An hour east of Venice, in the province of Udine, Italy, three small outlying villages make up an area quaintly known as “The Chair Triangle.” For centuries, the municipalities of Manzano, Corno di Rosazzo, and San Giovani al Natisone have been home to workshops and factories, woodworkers and artisans, tool-makers and sawmills, all devoted to producing the more than 40 million chairs that emerge each year from the region. The city of Udine itself is no slouch in the manufacturing department — it’s home to Moroso, one of Italy’s most storied brands — but the chair triangle is known more for its specialized production and for manufacturers who do anonymous, subcontracted work for the big brands.