Interior Design: Archiplan Studio
Project: Brolettouno Apartment / Restoration of a Small Apartment
Location: Mantova, Lombardia, Italy
Photographer: Davide Galli
The project involves the restoration of a small apartment for tourist use in the historical centre of Mantova. The apartment BROLETTOUNO belongs to a long design research path, which emerges in various interventions on built heritage.
Basically we try to keep together two worlds, the one of the old and the one of the new, in a balance able to guarantee the identity of both of them. Light and shadow are kept together in their ambiguity and plurality, without sacrificing the reasons of one at the expense of the other.
In particular the project emphasizes the differences and the heterogeneities of single spaces, in which ambiguity and contradiction prevales on the stylistic unitarity.
In this way the precision of the design element is able to emerges, besides the imperfection of the material element to which the action of time gave a singular energy.
The furniture elements, all designed, define themselves as object cantankerous on one side and refined on the other, a sort of bestiary, and institute hybrid relationships with single spaces in which they are placed. The signs left by time, human work and aesthetic intention of different ages remain, while new signs overlap each other in a complexity which does not cancel the other knowledges.
Beauty can be found everywhere and does not belong to the intrinsic value of the material. It emerges in fragments overall, in evocative forms and their relationships. I believe that relationships represent the most important theme of our design path.
Our favorite relationships try to keep together the opposites, as force and fragility, perfect and imperfect, the gloss of a newly crafted product and the unpredictability of materials fell in abandonment. Every project represent a route and a synthesis attempt for open and evolving questions.