From Italy to Bocci, design rocks the great outdoors

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      Spring has truly sprung only after the leftover Easter chocolate has been cleared off the store shelves and replaced with brightly coloured backyard accessories. Gaudy displays of plastic plates, glassware, and patio lanterns are the most obvious seasonal shift both at department and drug stores. A few hundred dollars (or less) could easily outfit your average apartment or condo balcony in an explosion of cheerful rainbow hues.

      Meanwhile, at the higher end of the retail spectrum of custom outdoor designer furnishings, preferred palettes usually favour the muted end of the colour wheel. The prevailing wisdom with such big-ticket purchases is identical to that of interior furniture: to extend its life, go neutral and spice it up with easily replaceable and much less expensive hits of colour, like throws and pillows. But conventional wisdom seems to be on the outs, with a number of high-end international outdoor furniture designers embracing riotous colour while at the same time inventing new materials or rethinking existing ones in order to pull it off.

      “She designs everything you see in her furniture, from the look of the piece to what it’s made of,” Ross Bonetti says of Italian interior and exterior furniture designer Paola Lenti. Bonetti, the president of Livingspace Interiors, points to several of Lenti’s colourful, modern pieces arranged on his showroom floor in the Armoury District (roughly, on First and Second avenues between Burrard and Fir streets). From a microfibre-upholstered couch in a light dove grey to a circular nylon-weave “dog bed” sun lounger, Lenti has pushed the boundaries of outdoor-furniture design.

      “A lot of the major large companies and designers will go to Paola Lenti to see what she’s doing with colour, fabric,” Bonetti says, pointing to Lenti’s striking “Ami” occasional chair, woven out of custom-designed nylon climbing rope in vibrant shades of acid green and canary yellow. “Everything here, including the carpets, is made for outdoor and uses cutting-edge technical materials,” he continues. “The water will go right through this nylon weave and come out of the bottom,” he says, lifting up a beanbag style chair to show the Gore-Tex–style base that allows the cushy chaise to dry out. “If it gets out in the rain, in an afternoon it’ll dry out and be ready the next day.”

      Like many of the world’s avant-garde designers, Paola Lenti is a regular at the Salone Internazionale del Mobile, a biannual gathering of the titans of international furniture design that last took place this past April in Milan. Bonetti says the Lenti exhibition in a rented monastery transformed the courtyards into magical chapels of modern design. “Everyone goes,” he says of her showcase, “whether they carry her furniture or not. It’s a destination space because she really broadcasts the present and the future.”

      Prices for original pieces from such internationally renowned furniture designers far outstrip the buying power of the average person, and certainly that of your average newspaper design columnist. (For example, a Paola Lenti Ami chair starts at $6,500, and a custom outdoor sectional sofa by Italian wood-framed masters Roda can cost in excess of $50,000.) However, their importance comes not from the few who can afford them; it stems, instead, from the fact that they represent, as Bonetti says, a glimpse of the future.

      Those synthetic wicker sectional sofas sold by the hundreds across the country had to come from somewhere before filtering down through the independent furniture boutiques and finally landing in the garden section of the local Canadian Tire. Look back on some images of the Salone 20 years ago and you might even spy the original high-concept inspiration.

      “Every year, there are a few companies whose showcases really capture the imagination,” Bonetti says. This time, he says, the draws were Lenti’s space-age fabrics and shapes, Baccarat’s crystal chandeliers, Dutch lighting giant Moooi, and Bocci, the small Vancouver-based lighting company headquartered upstairs from his own store.

      Vancouver-based Bocci conquered Europe’s lighting expo, Euroluce, with the new exterior ambient illumination line.

      Bocci, powered by designer Omer Arbel, made its Salone debut this year at Euroluce, the lighting expo that runs concurrently with the furniture expo. After a rigorous and costly application process, the relatively new company conquered the festival with a new exterior ambient lighting system unlike anything currently available.

      “The media and industry were so interested because for exterior lighting, there’s never been anything like this,” says Bocci’s Cristina Belmonte. “For garden lighting, you usually have direct sources of illumination, but this is ambient; it’s like sculpture.” Already available for interior use as a clear sconce, Bocci launched the new exterior line with a second colour, a dark amber. A brief tour of their warehouse and head office uncovers several other prototype colours that will be moved into production in the coming months and years. “This is Bocci,” Belmonte says. “There will always be more colour.”

      Meanwhile, back downstairs, Bonetti muses on the past and future of the Canadian start-up. “When you saw how excited people were with the Bocci showcase at Euroluce, it’s hard to believe that five years ago we visited them off-site in Tortona, where the one-offs [whose Salone applications aren’t accepted] go. They had one single fixture hanging off a forklift. And they were serving beer. And now they’re the toast of the world. I’d say it all looks bright for them now.”

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