Play the game of stone design

“As a pedriatic illness, substantially beneficent, that forces a child to stay in bed for a week and then gives him back to his normal life taller and healthier than before, particular curiosity and enthusiasm are “infecting” the design world. The word has become a passpartout able to open any door. Because everything existing has a shape, or rather the shape, the material fact, is the only effective proof of the existence of something, everything can be led back to design: more generally, everything is design.  A dangerous operation like this has the risk of reducing design into fashion: while promoting its success, this also empties it of its meanings and slowly exiles it from the real world. Special effects, extravagant shapes thought to gratuitously shock the taste of the public, designer transformed in stars, taking from the stardom the worst habits or an over-dimensioned self-esteem.” .
Facing this matter, practical experiences are multiplying as well, without renouncing to a legitimate creativity but also proposing specific solutions for the contemporary living spaces. It’s the case of Play, the new collection of stone elements for the bathroom furnishing signed by VISTOaw for Pibamarmi.

Easy Square basin from Pibamarmi Play collection

In opposition to some eccentric and garish shapes seen recently, the young designer team takes a step back and creates simple and continuous profiles for a series of object with immediate names, talking in a plain but direct way the language of a timeless modernity, with soft and essential lines and, above all, restrained dimensions that perfectly adapt to the often minimum surfaces of the contemporary baths. According to VISTOaw a bathroom of limited dimensions doesn’t force to renounce the stone, it’s not a constrain but represents instead an encouragement to play with the stone material in never-seen-before compositions of shapes that can be circular, elliptical or squared with smoothed corners; indeed the light and compact Easy and Quick basins, the Simple bathtubs and the Idro Soft shower plate, let the customer a vast expressive freedom because they can be installed in a separate position or along the walls, and can also go together with other series.

Details of the collection Play from Pibamarmi.

As it suits to shapes taken from the stone, the borders and the profiles of the bathtubs and the basins are full and net but don’t exceed in depth, the monolith volumes are well proportioned, the finishing of the stone surfaces are smoothed and silk-like, soft to the touch. Each technical element of the Play collection, alone or in pair, can find its proper collocation in an existing bathroom, each object can be distributed with numerous flexible solutions in a space that doesn’t need to be specifically dimensioned. Beyond every trend, Easy, Quick, Simple, and Idro Soft aren’t thought to take the primary role in a catalogue environment but to be functional in the real world, in a possible every-day life, creating with the users and their needs an immediate and effective interaction.

by Davide Turrini

Aurelio Magistà, “Il contagio del design” p. 6, in Arredamento & design 2008-2009, Roma, L’Espresso, 2008.

For a deeper examination of the theme of the contemporary bathroom as a practical space and as “representational space” see Paolo Scianchi, Mara Corradi, “Verso il bagno Camp”, Bagno Prodotti & Design, 2009, pp. 4-42.