The “Pupazzi” series represents the most experimental part of our laboratory, the frontier of our research on materials and shapes, the space devoted to a total and absolute creative freedom that we give ourselves from time to time.
The Pupazzi collection is made of small multifunctional pieces of furniture, a “pocket” format born in 2011, almost by chance. That time we had collected some fascinating ruins in the cellars of our friends: scrap metal and pieces of wood that were speaking to us, just like Pinocchio did to Geppetto.
The idea was to experiment with some combinations of these wrecks with the bright colors of an industrial lacquer.
With this project we wanted to achieve surreal effects, strong contrasts. We wanted to give a tonic injection of irony to pieces of old wood grayed by time. Over the years the covering-disguise materials have become a lot: iron, copper, plastic, painted panels, glass, mirrors, fabrics, fragments of old objects, toys, resins, blackboards and billboards.
The practice of reusing and recovering material has refined our expertise over time. We now see a possibility of new aesthetic life in practically everything.
Over time we have created a ramshackle army of creatures with bizarre shapes: obsolete robots, grandmother’s appliances, imaginary animals, talking boxes. The first products of this experimentation immediately seemed to us endowed, in a very particular way, with special empathic abilities, like the puppets that children hug before falling asleep. And so we called them “Pupazzi” (Puppets).
Some of them, originally designed to be bedside tables, have become furniture for the living room. Others, which we had built as entrance cabinets, have ended up in a bathroom or a kitchen. Others that we had imagined next to a comfortable sofa ended up in the bedroom, as natural born bedside tables!
We brought the first puppets to a fair in December 2011, in Rome: Seven cabinets that were playing the chance of their progeny. They were vaguely embarrassed – it was our first major fair – they pretended a cold merchant’s ease. We sold two and three more and ended up in a shop in Pistoia.
In 2012 we decided to make a second “baked” of Pupazzi. We spent weeks drawing, on the train, in the bathroom, everywhere. The laboratory was filled with small sheets with strange primitive frescoes . The “hedgehog”, the “sergeant with glasses”, the “skier” and a little robot with a tilted belly were born. We took them to Florence, Milan and Perugia, we sold two or three at the fair, no more. But eventually the second series also ran out.
This innate unpredictability of use has become the strong point of the Pupazzi: in 2014 we made six Pupazzi for a club; their honorable function? Bins for separate waste collection!
On the wings of success we built a display cabinet measuring three meters by three, which housed nine puppets, and we created the third and fourth series. To avoid any form of didactic suggestion, we have given up calling them with a name. So the puppet collection is simply a numerical series, potentially infinite, of unique pieces: # 1, # 2, # 3, etc ..
There are brothers puppets, it is true, but never twins: the form is the same, but the dress is different. The creative process of building a puppet is a game with constantly changing rules.
Every now and then in the middle of a bigger job, one of us, as if struck by a vision, starts making a puppet. The game led to a real puppet family tree. We got to fifty and then to a hundred. In September 2016, the # 120 puppet was born.
The puppet project has the merit of having brought us off the rails of the carpentry and of having catapulted us into a playful dimension, at times performative, halfway between Geppetto and Doctor Frankenstein. The puppets have taken on different formats over time: bookcases, totems, sideboards, lockers: this short story is a photograph of the path of this project, which intends to show all its future potential directions.
We candidly admit that the passion and freedom with which, over the years, we have carried out our research has led us to territories that are sometimes very far from those of departure. Some projects remained open, some pieces did not have a sequel.
We have included in this section a selection of the most significant ideas for us that we hope to be able to develop in the coming years.
The research we have carried out in recent years on bookcases and equipped walls, pushing us to the limits of the search for movement and lightness, has placed us in front of numerous construction and design problems. An interesting solution, able to combine expressive freedom and constructive simplicity, came to us using perforated and colored iron sheets. The idea is to fix the sinuous interplay of the shelves and storage modules to an iron support, easier to assemble and transferable as needs change. The shape of the colored sheets helps to make the wall design dynamic. Two prototypes of “Retina” bookcases joined the Mutabor exhibition in March 2016.
In November 2015 we created the first equipped wall using simple parallelepipeds in wood and lacquered Mdf, arranged one on top of the other and fixed it to the wall with hidden stops. We have given these parallelepipeds the name of “Boxes”. In the following months we have realized numerous projects with the “Boxes” and we have included them in our exhibition “Mutabor”. Inverted boxes, open, closed, large, small, one above the other, colored or white, in wood or with recycled materials. We have invented stylized animals that rise above the furniture and radiators, and open walls that separate the different rooms of a house.
Initially we arranged the “boxes” along the walls in a free way, like toys under the Christmas tree, experimenting increasingly daring visual balances: inverted pyramids and irregular rhombuses. Then, by chance, some boxes sprouted their legs and the first “box beings” were born: we called these new metaphysical friends the Balocchi, in honor of Santa Claus.
Zen rigor. A track, made up of two parallel iron rods, crosses a solid wood module, dividing the internal spaces and creating useful book-holding handles on the outside.
We collaborated with Marzia from February 2015 until the realization of our Mutabor exhibition: we included her paintings in two of our furniture projects, a low sideboard and a totem. For us it is important to involve different experiences and vocations in the process of creating furniture.
You choose the ingredients!
Our catalogue has to be taken as a guide among our creations, ideas and kinds of solutions for decorating your home. They are a sort of family albums which show all the furniture designed and built along the years.
You can use it as an inspirational idea and move from it towards your custom-made and personalized furniture.
You can mix the ingredients as you like it: shapes, materials, dimensions, woods, reclaimed or new solid wood. This is the starting point which leads you to your customized handmade furniture!
Define the internal spaces, the number of drawers and doors and any special characteristic you think the furniture should have. Or if you want we can make it for you!
Which finishes do you prefer? You can choose almost any detail of the new furnishing: handles, colors, finishes, materials, wood species, etc.
Please feel free to send us some photos of the room in which the furniture will be inserted. This is very useful for us to understand your taste and style.
If you have a budget in mind please let us know: this can help us to define your project.
And then… we do the rest!
First of all we create a 3D project which gives you an idea of the result. From this step we start to modify the project as you suggest. We continue until we don’t reach your ideal furniture!
