All’Origine goes to Otto Studio
All’Origine’s first time at OTTO Studio, as guests of Paola Navone
A Pop-Up store for the Milano Design Week
April 2024 marked All’Origine’s return to Fuorisalone after a long hiatus, and it was indeed a return in great style: we went as guests of Paola Navone to set up shop inside her studio in Via Tortona.
Spoiler alert: we are going again for the 2025 edition of Fuorisalone!
The exterior of OTTO Studio, part of the Opificio 31 complex in Via Tortona 31, Milano (photo: Enrico Conti)
OTTO Studio, founded by Paola Navone, is run together with Cristina Pettenuzzo, Domenico Diego and Gian Paolo Venier. They have a team of fifteen people and together they develop amazing projects for clients such as Baxter, Poltrona Frau, Alessi, Molteni, Driade, Armani Casa, Poliform… (this list could go on for an entire paragraph) ranging from interior design projects to styling, product and graphic design. It is truly a great honor for us to be their guests!
Paola Navone’s career is indeed incredibly rich. A life of travels has led her to a unique outlook and a design language made of well informed contaminations. Her love for the southern and eastern parts of the world shine through her western stylistic vocabulary. Navone’s deep knowledge of faraway places and cultures implies her references are not limited to the present day.
While for many of her product design works she draws inspiration from traditional crafts to produce something entirely new, in her styling and interior design projects Navone combines actual old furniture and objects with contemporary cutting edge design. The outcomes are always surprising and iconic. “Make the ordinary extraordinary” is often cited as the core of her design philosophy.
Her ability to integrate the new and the old is surely the reason we have always been so attracted towards her work!
“Koi Koi” vases by Paola Navone for Porzellan Manufacture Reichenbach (photo courtesy of Reichenbach)
The so called “muro magico”. An installation of utilitarian ceramics used as cladding by Paola Navone on a wall of her private home in Milano (photo: Enrico Conti)
Just t be clear: none of the projects above were made in collaboration with us! And while these might probably not be the two single images OTTO Studio would use to present themselves, we have chosen them because they are probably better than words to explain why here at All’Origine we feel so connected with their vision.
The few images we’ve chosen, including Paola Navone’s portrait, also serve the purpose of highlighting her intense use of the color blue. Has she made only blue products and interiors in her exceptional career? Of course not! But Navone has indeed worked a lot with the many shades of this color and has surely made it part of her brand.
So, what did All’Origine dare present inside this Studio which is so entangled in the recent history of design?
Art Director Corina Jucan selected over 5000 unique objects that inhabited a large part of the studio for the duration of Fuorisalone: composed in her signature pictorial style they formed a giant color gradient made of mid-century ceramic and glass vases, antique books, seltzer bottles and many more unique items. The space operated both as a shop and as a living installation in continuous evolution: objects were replaced and moved around for the whole duration of the event.
This space, on the ground floor, is the studio’s library. Normally it is home to a wonderful collection of books about product, furniture and fabric design, fashion, pottery and other crafts. They were carefully moved to storage to make room for our European mid-century originals for the duration of this event.
The “mural” by Art Director Jucan was the main feature of the show. It was conceived as a pictorial mix of objects from all our product categories fading gradualy from pink to green (signature colors of All’Origine) to blue as a homage to Paola Navone and OTTO Studio.
