Welcome Back to the Manzoni
Our joint Restaurant, Shop and Showroom in Milan.
Tom Dixon's Grand Tour begins at The Manzoni, our joint Restaurant, Showroom and Shop, located in the heart of Italy's commercial and cultural capital.
We wanted to look at different ways of being present in Milan, rather than holding pop-up interventions every year. We wanted something more solid.
The Manzoni is a place where people slow down and experience our products in a live setting.
This year, during Salone de Mobile, we are staging a Luminosity Exhibition, where we will explore the potential of light to transform space.
Tom Dixon: So the Grand Tour starts here at the Manzoni, and the Manzoni is a restaurant that we initiated two years ago and really the idea of this restaurant was to have a space which belonged to us in Milan where we could come back every year. After many years of being in lots of extraordinary locations all around town, it felt like it was time to invest in something more solid.
So what we've got here is a whole series of different textures and different materialities, and really you can see here the kind of investment into the structure of the buildings: Massive granite bars, a lot of artwork that talks a lot about texture. I think it's important for us in interior design to do big contrasts between very rough, very heavy, very light, very luminous.
So what's great about having restaurants and places where people can visit is not only can you slow people down - they can really enjoy our furniture and our lighting - is it's a great place to road test some of our latest designs. So three years ago we launched FAT Chair here for instance, and here we're really experimenting a lot with Luminosity which is the big subject this year, and of course what's fascinating about Lighting is its' potential to completely transform a space.
Puck Coupe Glasses x 2
This pair of Tom Dixon coupe glasses are made of mouth-blown glass with a hint of smoke colour. Anchored with a thick base which is reminiscent of game pucks, minimal and heavy-weight, Puck glasses are resilient enough to survive in a professional cocktail environment.
HYDRO Chair
HYDRO is a limited-edition chair created in collaboration with HYDRO, the biggest aluminium producer in the world. The HYDRO chair is an innovation in aluminium technology. It has been blow-formed (through a process called Superplastic Forming) at high temperatures and then laser cut by robots. These methods were developed in the automotive industries to make deep and complex forms that were impossible to achieve a few years ago. The ballooned pattern gives strength and rigidity and lends a soft and humorous pop sensibility to the lightweight and shiny metal sheet.
Each chair is marked with a limited edition number and comes with a certificate signed by Tom Dixon.