The first collaboration between the company and the French designer is a symphony of values, vision, and style. Hence the new Foil table, a synthesis of essential beauty and functionality.
There are deep relationships that arise from fortunate encounters. There are also innovative creations that are the result of a simply authentic vision. It is this combination that defines the new, unprecedented collaboration between Mara and Christophe Pillet.
On the one hand, the Brescia-based company specialised in producing systems and furnishing elements with a strong technical component, and on the other the French designer renowned on the international contemporary scene for his extreme formal refinement and taste for simplicity. To bring them together and immediately generate a synergical bond destined to last over time, a common philosophy based on a design that combines linear aesthetics with a high degree of technology.
The result of this creative partnership is the new Foil table, a furniture archetype that reveals its original nature through an apparent formal simplicity. Foil, together with this unprecedented collaboration, will make their official debut at Workspace Expo in Paris (26-28 March), and later at the Salone del Mobile.Milano (16-21 April).
The absence of complexity – “In Mara I found a very modern idea of how to use the technology. It is there, but it is carefully hidden. The mechanics disappear and the product is perfectly functional. This simplicity, this clarity and this ‘invisible mastery’ won me over’ immediately”. This short statement of the designer Christophe Pillet represents the key to understanding the furniture project designed for Mara. Indeed, the Foil table appears as “a top with four legs”, all in metal. There is no complexity on sight, no articulated structure, no overexposure in form or technique: just a flat surface bordered by a minimal frame and supported by four ultra-thin legs. “A line, therefore, a sign imprinted in the air”, according to its author’s vision.
This is as much the case in the fixed version as it is in the model with a top integrated with Mara mechanisms that allow the top itself to easily move and reveal the storage space underneath. The frame is not only an aesthetic detail, it serves to conceal the mechanical system, as well as any accessories that Foil may be equipped with, like the practical drawers. Extrapolating such simplicity and such an ideal of lightness was therefore the real challenge, to create at the same time a product that is solid, resistant, but also dynamic and transversal in use.
A challenge that Mara undertook and achieved thanks to research and skilful raw materials’ processing, while combining the manufacturing expertise and the most modern technologies. Foil is suited to furnishing office and corporate spaces, but also contemporary residential environments, following the way already started with the Icon seating collection, to the comfortable domestic dimension.
Rediscovering the functional beauty of the office world – designed to be completely monochrome, Foil is suitable for living on its own or in workspace contexts, transforming itself into a system that expands the space in broad perspectives. And despite being the new entry in the Mara catalogue, it lives in pleasant combination with numerous collections of the brand, in perfect and harmonic style.
Mara and Pillet have therefore designed a project that responds to the current concept of the office – an open, versatile place that facilitates meetings and the sharing of ideas. But also, a space where the desk still has a key role to express and stimulate one’s skills. “We wanted to bring simplicity into the traditionally complex and excessively technical world of work,” explains the designer. “Instead, with Mara, we imagined an office dimension where calm dominates, where working well is the priority, where the human value equals, if not exceeds, that of the furnishing element. The beauty of Foil, in fact, is also given by its ability to disappear in space and leave the role of protagonists to people “.
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Photography courtesy of Mara
