Ceramiche Ragno inaugurates its first flagship showroom in the iconic Porta Nuova district in Milan: 400 square metres of display area, with large arched show windows on Via Marco Polo 9, to present all the brand’s latest ceramic and porcelain stoneware products.
Designed by Benedetta Tagliabue – EMBT, the showroom is a kaleidoscope of colors, textures and patterns that provide an eye-catching account of the brand’s history and technical capabilities, demonstrating all the expressive potential of ceramics.
“Ceramic is an ancient, natural material, used for construction since time immemorial. We have played around with the theme of spiders and spiders’ webs, rediscovering the history of the Ragno brand, creating a common thread that links the past, present and future,” explains Benedetta Tagliabue, describing the project.
The central feature of the exhibit, the materials library, constitutes a genuine tribute to the brand. “The idea of displaying the Ragno collections by means of large structures resembling a spider’s web came to us from the history of the company, which used a stylised spider as its first trademark,” Benedetta Tagliabue comments. “Given the wide range of collections, we were able to decorate this web, which is nothing more nor less than a real materials library, with different colors and finishes, and to tell a truly unique, fascinating story throughout the whole interior.”
Visitors are aware of this fascination right from the entrance to the showroom, starting with the show windows, where the large slimline stoneware slabs of the Incanto collection strike an attractive balance with the small, super-glossy, hyper-decorated ceramic tiles of Storie, with a system of intersecting cable ties that again evoke the geometric forms of a spider’s web.
“The floor is the other very impressive feature of this project,” Benedetta Tagliabue continues, “as it is a single, large mosaic, a real multicolor work of art, that demonstrates stoneware’s immense power to establish a dialogue between glossy and matt collections inspired by different materials, from wood to marble and from concrete to stone, in an absolutely natural harmony.”
The mosaic theme returns, in one of the rooms overlooking the courtyard, with a beautiful, unconventional homage to Giorgio De Chirico: the small, brightly colored tiles of the Storie collection reinterpret one of his metaphysical paintings from his “Le piazze d’Italia” anthology.
Its various rooms defined by a long succession of archways, the Ragno showroom presents the ceramic and stoneware collections using a completely original mode of display, which exhibits a wide variety of ceramic materials available to architects and consumers while suggesting exclusive combinations of the different surfaces in the range.
“We are proud to present a unique project that reflects the value of the Ragno brand today and that of the latest technologies applied to ceramic coverings,” comments CEO Mauro Vandini. “Ragno’s new Milan showroom presents our products in a fascinating, inspiring way, highlighting and promoting the continual evolution of our research and of ceramic materials themselves.”
Ceramiche Ragno
Via Marco Polo, 9
20124 Milan
