Design
Welcome to Cafè Marazzi
reading time: 4 minutes
The café is a repository of stories, a place where you can feel safe, establish new relationships and share with others.
A meeting place that seems timeless, where stoneware becomes a design paradigm that is both structural and decorative.
Welcome to Caffè Marazzi. A welcoming meeting-place with a timeless air thanks to its surreal fusion of retro allure and technological present/future. Within its walls, it keeps alive the echo of a refined tradition of hospitality - the core of European identity - which in the last two centuries transformed cafés into almost mythical intellectual hotspots, the part-bohemian, part-avant-garde haunts of artists and writers, unique hubs for socialisation and art de vivre. This space offers a contemporary reworking of the typical stylistic features of classic cafés, firmly ensconced in the collective imagination: marble inlays, mirrors, brasses, little tables with exquisite tops and plush chairs. But far from merely staging nostalgic, artificial moods from the past, it is actually the dynamic, emotional expression of leading-edge industrial materials culture and a mirror of today's society. A society which makes multiple uses of communal locations such as cafés, which have also become improvised workplaces.
The architecture, apparently made up of the finest stones, is actually a complex composition, almost an origami, of giant-sized ceramic slabs. Here the stoneware of the Grande collection (Marble, Stone and Resin Look) becomes the design paradigm, both structural and decorative, creating zigzag backdrops that modulate the interior and infuse it with intense tactile and chromatic vibrations. On both sides, the walls are alive with multi-material geometric compositions: stones, antique marbles and modern resins dialogue, alternate, reflect each other and overlap, generating three-dimensional effects in a kaleidoscopic wallpaper with a techno-déco flavour.
The marbles are of the finest, now rare varieties, deeply rooted in the Italian architectural heritage, from Verde Aver from Val d'Aosta to Calacatta Vena Vecchia from Tuscany and the more exotic Sahara Noir, deep black with white and gold streaks. In the age of the digital reproducibility of nature, their vein patterns and shade variations are given new life with greater clarity and sustainability than the original. The same applies to the deep shades of Pietra di Vals or the copper-streaked Gris du Gent, materials which, with just a change in thickness, achieve metamorphosis from wall coverings to table tops. The bar counter, which stands out against the naturalistic backdrop (a poetic exception to the geometrical rule of the decorative scheme) with its Calacatta Vena Vecchia marble-look ceramic bulk, confirms the ease with which this material passes from architecture to furniture. And acts as a neutral canvas for the virtuosity of digital printing.
In Caffè Marazzi, ceramics become both scene and substance, aesthetic experience and technical performance. For sharing.
