Zanotta's surreal collection

Italian brand Zanotta has launched a furniture collection based on designs by Italian architect and designer Carlo Mollino.

The extravagant Italian is famous for his many passions: skiing, car racing, jewellery, photography and design. He has written numerous technical patents, as well as philosophical articles, theatre and film reviews. He published books on cinema and fiction novels. Mollino could have made a brilliant career in any field if he had managed to focus on one.

During his life, the famous Italian built no more than a dozen buildings, but they all went down in architectural history. He didn't collaborate with any furniture brand, but nowadays furniture made to his designs is sold for hundreds of thousands of euros.

This extraordinary man designed simple furniture with a surrealist look: it might have been the furnishing seen in a dream. Sensuality is evident in all shapes and lines. The designer did not like straight angles; his inspiration came from the curves of the female body.  "Aerodynamic surrealism" was the name given to Mollino's style decades later.

Carlo Mollino died in 1973, but fortunately his records have survived and are preserved at the Turin Polytechnic, where he was a professor. Zanotta gained access to these archives - prototypes, notes, sketches - and produced several remakes based on them. One of the first was the elegant Fenis chair.

In all, the Mollino collection consists of eight pieces based on sketches by the Italian designer. However, most of his works were too complicated for mass production, so the Zanotta team had to be inventive. The Cavour table, for example, was previously made from several fragments, while the leg is now made from a single piece of walnut. For the Reale model, the table top has been replaced by a glass top. The Ardea armchair is upholstered in a new fabric that is inspired by the upholstery on the Villa Mollino armchairs in Turin.

New Studio is the official representative of Italian brand Zanotta in Belarus.