Living is once again central to every corner of the home. A theater of life experienced, where the quality of the home environment is the key premise for planning the various rooms: increasingly more versatile, multifunctional, able to adapt and mould itself to a second usage. An idea of a cosy, reassuring and welcoming home. But constantly evolving, which Molteni&C interprets through wall systems, the protagonists of the project and part and parcel of the architecture.
While in the previous few years the narrative project paid tribute to the great protagonists of international modernism, this year references to the roots of the movement are fleetingly mentioned, evocative. It mentions the atmospheres: the fluid homes, to be lived in, the large and convivial rooms linked one to the other, the permeable internal and external spaces. And above all that idea of space, extremely elegant but without any ostentation for ostentation’s sake, in tune with the surrounding landscape. Paraphrasing Alvar Aalto: spaces that in their form express content and that content is linked to Nature.
“The home aspires to holistic well-being and to organic playfulness”
Explains creative director Vincent Van Duysen, who is looking for lightness, fluidity and the etherial in the Molteni&C|Dada 2022 narrative project.
Like the great examples of the homes of American modernism, Vincent van Duysen imagines a single storey house, in which you can feel in touch with the ground, with the outdoors. Think of homes marked by transparency, organized with light-weight partitions and wide outward-looking verandas and terraces: thresholds, open spaces halfway between indoors and outdoors, spaces that are private but in direct contact with light and Nature.
“It’s a hymn to ethereal design, inspired by the great pavilions of the modernist era. Dynamic spaces characterized by the lightness of the lines, skillfully combined with details and materials that create softly shaped products”.
Vincent Van Duysen
“Lines and forms”, Van Duysen specifies, “search for light for a never-ending dialogue with space and with human beings. The products are conceived for revival, to live again and mitigate that sense of precariousness, to search for pleasure and happiness and to fully embrace Nature: air, light, oxygen”.
The Molteni&C|Dada 2022 narrative project proposes a home with a well-defined style, with no overlapping, where the decoration stems from the aptness and the harmony of the forms: more rounded, soft and enveloping.
It proposes a coherent space, in which every detail is part of a unitary principle that animates the project. In this approach, the furnishings and the modular units become protagonists in the layout of the rooms.
They are part of the architecture, because they fuse with the very articulation of the house, integrating new compositional possibilities that wrap round the existing architectures, such as the fireplace, or foresee new built-in functions such as the bar and the home office. In this way a symbiosis is created between furnishing systems and architectural walls. And a dialogue between the structural and the mobile furniture, which become soloists within the home. Vincent Van Duysen is fond of pure, sensual-feeling material finishes. Pale and material woods, such as natural oak and eucalyptus, handbrushed or with visible grain, to create unique surfaces, live to the touch.
In textiles he prefers light and earthy colors and material patterns that highlight the rounded shape of the cushions. Hence Dadirri by Marta Ferri, which the designer defines as “a textile collection that aims to find the ideal combination between quiet contemplation and close attention to the natural world around us, a homage to the warm colors of the earth and its infinite shades. A harmonious mechanism that brings neutral tones together, starting from greys, beige and camel, superimposing them in net contrast to bright colors such as moss green, yellow ochre and rust”. For a home to be “felt”, soft and real. To be wrapped around itself, like a dress made to measure.
“This year”, concludes Van Duysen, “our products have been stimulated by a strong desire not to abandon fluidity, sensuality or comfort. The concept of comfort is also visually translated in the tactility of the materials. Our eye is guided on every curve while a great feeling of calm emanates from the whole range. The notion of protection, of shelter, is very important in my work and I think the collection reflects that well. We are enveloped in these fluid forms as if we were inside a cocoon in which we would like to live ever.”
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