After the preview presentation in its construction site with a three-dimensional visual installation on the occasion of the FuoriSalone, the new Porro showroom in via Visconti di Modrone 29 officially opens its doors on 6 October in Milan, confirming its ever-changing interior concept.
“Porro is a company that has always tried to overcome its limits by moving, each time, with a different creative spectrum. After almost twenty years in via Durini, once again we have changed the rule, deciding to move to a completely unexpected place, very visible and with a particularly special architecture". Piero Lissoni, Art Director Porro
“This year Porro changes house and arrives between via Visconti di Modrone and via Ronchetti, in a very special space, netsled between a busy street and a secret street in Milan. It is a space that has double height, multiple levels and gives us the possibility of making an architectural story, interpreting our systems as real architecture. A true full immersion in Porro design, but also a meeting point with architects to develop new tailor-made projects together." Maria Porro, head of marketing and communication Porro.
A building with a dual soul, with its six high-visibility windows framed by steel-clad columns on the central Via Visconti di Modrone and the large industrial windows at the back framing the pedestrian Via Ronchetti, with hidden glimpses of old Milan, the new showroom in fact offers a multi-level interior full of design possibilities all to be explored: new challenges for Porro's sartorial ability to furnish custom spaces with artisanal precision, declining its architectural soul in unprecedented installations.
Piero Lissoni's architectural project transforms the new showroom into a pure and linear white box, a conceptual place where things happen and whose six windows become like monitors over the city. The space is spread over two floors with a mezzanine on the first floor. The stairwell becomes the centerpiece of the space: a parallelepiped whose walls are covered with full-height mirror with a backlit opaline back. The suspended white sheet metal staircase is like an origami ribbon. On the second floor, the white expanded metal parapet defining the limits of the mezzanine maintains transparency by making the spaces dialogue.
In a pathway flooded with light and punctuated by full-height and full-length volumes and moving partitions, Porro unveils its world, in which the company's systems, true complex but flexible architectures, design spaces in an original way, dialoguing with the product collections: objects characterized by pure geometric shapes, technological details, and research on materials and finishes, signed by leading names on the design scene.
"Even for the objects that populate the space, we decided to work with unique pieces in harmony with Porro design and reflecting the philosophy of our company, on the one hand the concept of research and on the other the purity of form, establishing collaborations with exquisitely Milanese realities, but not only.
From Golran's sartorial carpets and Flos lamps, ranging through the pictures, paintings and ceramics related to architecture by the Antonia Jannone gallery, without forgetting Archivio Alessandro Mendini sculptures and Bruno Munari's ancestor faces by Corraini Edizioni, two designers with whom we have always been very close. Our wardrobes are embellished by the original clothes and stage costumes from the workshop SlowCostume with the sculptural hat creations by the designer and artisan Francesco Ballestrazzi, while the abstract works in blown Muran glass by the artist Michela Cattai and the wooden houses by Matteo di Ciommo and the art, design and photography books by Skira are chosen to complement our bookcases and pieces of furniture. With a mix of proposals for sale and works of art only to be admired, more than a store, Porro Milano wants to be a very special place, where you can linger letting yourself be guided by suggestions, and each thing has its own unique story and is chosen with love as Porro furniture is: a space that lives, in continuous transformation." Maria Porro
Even the lighting is special, combining the bamboo lamps proposed at the last Salone del Mobile, in the name of naturalness and harmony, with the cascade of glass tubes made for the opening of Porro's first Milanese showroom in 2004, a true work of luminous art: both designed by Piero Lissoni and made by Porro as custom products, and carefully preserved over the years, tell of the company's ability to place itself next to designers, and concretize ideas that previously existed only in thought or imagination.
Interiors under the banner of diffuse design, which calibrate architectural rigor, industrial precision and accurate craftsmanship, in a result of absolute simplicity.
Architectural design project + set up: Piero Lissoni
Styling: Elisa Ossino Studio