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Enterprises
Above, Spun Coriolis Chair by Thomas Heatherwick (Cristiano Corte). Top, from the left, Missoni in Beverly Hills (Missoni), hammered mirrorpolished steel (Hundven Clements-Photography).
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Cantù – furniture industry “capital” in Brianza, northern Italy – is the place where Marzorati Ronchetti was established, created and developed in time. From one generation to the next, it has now reached its 90th anniversary. A perfect example of the “capability to continue in time” of an artisanal business, a “savoir-faire” testifying the value of a know-how difficult to repeat, based on an artisanal and entrepreneurial wisdom able to answer to what is “outside standards” and fulfil the most varied and complex exigencies in the world of design, then extended to the architecture of interiors, to exceptional designing objects and the world of art on the whole. The business area of home and interior design was the core activity of Fratelli Marzorati, then becoming Marzorati Ronchetti in 1956, a name remaining unchanged even after the turn of the millennium. In the years featuring the economic boom in Italy, the Cantù-located company became a true reference point for the artisanal companies working in the furniture field. A field where the “classic” furniture was still dominating, proposed according to the lucky formula of total furniture, but where the demand of “modern” furniture was already increasing. In the same years, many artisanal enterprises and carpentries with few employees started a mechanised production in some Italian areas, turning into small or small-medium family companies, in a highly fragmented business area whose DNA was and is still imbued with that “artisanal heritage” enabling the supremacy of the Italian model of furniture design, characterised among others by
high flexibility and innovation. In 1947 Azucena creation was one of the many interesting and lasting initiatives of Italian design, one of the many peculiar stories within a complex multifaceted and multilined milieu, if we want to consider the project of architecture, interiors and design as a unitary phenomenon – where Marzorati Ronchetti is an indirect and precious protagonist. Azucena was the first shop in Italy dealing with the production and sale of interior objects and furniture. Wanted by Luigi Caccia Dominioni with Ignazio Gardella and others, Azucena was founded first of all to overcome the lack of furniture and objects suitable to the houses designed or renovated by the same architects, and maybe also to go beyond the too restraining programme of “rational furniture”. More than a catalogue of modern furniture destined to a wide audience, more than a programme “cried” according to typical avant-garde behaviours, Azucena collected without any outcry interior design pieces coming from a more articulated design path and thought, to complete the interiors of houses being built or renovated by the same creators. Experimentation and elegance, measure and essentiality, intuition and ingeniousness are the main features of Azucena’s production, most of which was made by Fratelli Marzorati and then by Marzorati Ronchetti, furniture always aiming to emphasise an idea of interior design to which they are perfectly suitable in terms of concept and material intensity. These same features are also characterising the whole production by Marzorati Ronchetti.
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