Friends: Formafantasma
Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin, aka Formafantasma and designers of our brand new FFQT collection, welcome us to their just-renovated studio in Milan. The duo have always been the spokesmen for a new design sensibility that considers history, social and political evolutions and sustainability, core elements shaping their own discipline.
Their studio, where the new FFQT bathroom and kitchen taps have been installed, is a large former workshop space that is rigorous in its geometry, where one can easily imagine its glorious past made hard work and beautiful hand-crafted objects.
Overlooking the inner courtyard, amidst rough concrete and meticulous details without excess, is the series of large windows that provide light for the many plants that populate the house. Light tones prevail, natural untreated woods, a subdivision of space by function that lets you guess what is going on in the next room.
All around, a constellation of beautiful objects fill the vaste room: some designed for the many brands they’ve worked for, but some other created for their personal and artistic research, the very same one they’re so famous for. The inner courtyard of the former art printing factory is the first artboard to portray the iconic free-standing shower column for both outdoor or indoor use: the stainless steel stem support both the shower-head on top and through a series of rings, holds in place a common 5/8″ garden water hose.
The designers explain this provocation through their research that always animates their projects, which start from enhancing a simple idea: the archetype of the fountain which is here enriched in details and with small parasitical elements such as shelves and a mirror. A very common objects like a garden hose here acquires a different identity when in contrast to a more technologically detailed product. And last but not least the material: stainless steel gives robustness to the final result.
When approaching the design process of such a highly-detailed manufacturing process such as CNC milling stainless steel, instead of experiencing this technique as a limitation to imaginable forms, Formafantasma saw this as an aid to voluntarily conceiving silent objects: homes are variously full of narrative objects, which must be in the right balance to be appreciated.
“A silent object carries silent values such as durability, respect for the context in which it was conceived and the context in which it will be used.”
Andrea Trimarchi, Simone Farresin
Places where an object takes shape and places where an idea is born: nothing for Quadrodesign and Formafantasma, the shared rule is to weigh up how much the processes of industrial design and its manufacturing influence the environment thus narrowing down its impact in order to operate in a virtuous and responsible space.