Natuzzi Italia celebrates this year the sixty-fifth anniversary of the birth of the brand. Sixty-five years travelled by the company as a journey in search of harmony, inspired by the fertile land of Apulia, which fuelled the birth of Pasquale Natuzzi’s creativity and entrepreneurial ethics. This important anniversary was celebrated by the company with a packed programme of events and projects created to stage and represent the values that have marked the company’s history, taking it along a path of growth in identity and style.
Representing the identity and history of Natuzzi Italia is undoubtedly first and foremost the flagship store in Via Durini, which on the occasion of Milan Design Week was revisited in its architectural elements and layout, to evolve into a concept inspired by the refined elegance of ‘quiet luxury’, where the space dedicated to architects and interior decorators becomes even more central thanks to the new Natuzzi design studio.
It was against this backdrop that the new collection The Circle of Harmony – 65th Anniversary was presented, recounting the brand’s evolutionary path between past, present and future through the designs of Karim Rashid, Andrea Steidl and Simone Bonanni.
The three designers are also the protagonists, together with Pasquale Junior Natuzzi – Natuzzi’s chief brand and creative officer -, of a series of talks designed as moments of in-depth analysis to discover the behind the scenes of the new Natuzzi collection through the voices of the protagonists. Below is the talk with Pasquale J. Natuzzi and Karim Rashid, who for Natuzzi presented Memoria, a modular sofa inspired by the sense of welcome and closeness characteristic of Apulian culture: organic shapes and sinuous lines – evocative of the soft hills of the territory with their gentle, rounded reliefs – reinterpret in a contemporary perspective the beauty of the encounter and Natuzzi Italia’s vocation for harmony, comfort and design.
Another interesting talk involved Simone Bonanni and Andrea Steidl in dialogue with Pasquale J. Natuzzi.
Simone Bonanni presents Momento, Natuzzi Italia’s new sofa with its relaxed surfaces and soft lines that aims to establish a link between shapes and sensations. Conveying an aesthetic of relaxation and visual comfort, Momento emotionally engages the individual even before meeting their ergonomic needs.
Andrea Steidl, this year in his first collaboration with the company, has designed the Mirai sofa for Natuzzi Italia, which takes its inspiration from the architecture of the 13th century Frederician era in Puglia. Like the great Frederician castles, the new Mirai sofa has a structure with a strong personality, but at the same time light, showing an architectural and at the same time soft soul, a bold but also gentle and welcoming spirit and, thanks to a skilful optical illusion, the lines of the sofa – like those of the castles – only apparently diverge, only to come back together in a play of perpetual and repeated elements, as if to form a fanciful moving texture.
The new collection is then completed with the new Mindful and Snail sofas, a perfect combination of design and function, designed by the Natuzzi Design Centre, which extend the Comfortness collection, launched during the Milan Design Week 2023. Comfortness is the union of “comfort” and “wellness” and encapsulates Natuzzi’s new design philosophy, an innovative way of understanding comfort – a founding element of the brand’s DNA – that combines with wellness.
Mindful represents a sofa that transcends the ordinary. Inspired by the harmony of the human body’s movement, this sofa aims to redefine the paradigm of relaxation. Its harmonious form aims at well-being in a broad sense: it houses a mechanism designed to maximise comfort and promote health benefits by regulating heart rate and breathing.
The Snail modular sofa features cosy, rounded shapes that pay homage to comfort – a cornerstone of Natuzzi Italia’s heritage. Snail is a shell that comfortably accommodates and lets you linger in its relaxation.
Completing and enriching the 65th anniversary celebrations is also the return of Natuzzi Open Art, the patronage project desired by Chairman Pasquale Natuzzi that aims to make art accessible to all. Open Art returns to Milan thanks to the collaboration with the Apulian artist Gino Donvito who has created Puer Apuliae, a maxi-format work of over 8 metres in height composed of eighty-eight birch wood panels, on which the artist has hand-painted an imposing portrait, an ode to the greatness of Frederick II of Swabia, known precisely as Puer Apuliae, that is, son of Apulia, for having left indelible marks on this territory that today represent an inexhaustible source of inspiration for the Natuzzi Italia brand.
Puer Apuliae is composed of figures representing the link with the Apulian region, a borderland between sky and sea, where East meets West and where history has shaped over the centuries a Mediterranean landscape embellished with natural sculptures of olive trees, fortified farms, towns, squares and churches. On the occasion of Natuzzi’s 65th anniversary, Donvito celebrates the company, its values and its roots, depicting those places that are an essential part of the brand’s identity.
For more information visit: www.natuzzi.com
