“Design should be exciting”: this is the vision behind the essence of Saba. The company founded in 1987 in the province of Padua has a feminine spirit, starting with the entrepreneuse Amelia Pegorin, who has taken it to success thanks to remarkable creative sensitivity and a ‘human’ approach to business, always putting the client at the center of the project.
Since then, Saba has conducted ongoing research on living, a mission that now translates into the opening of its first flagship store in Milan, in collaboration with Spotti, a long-term reference point in the city for design lovers.
A space on Viale Piave in Milan, close to Porta Venezia and the fashion district, whose design has been assigned to the studio Quincoces-Dragò and the furnishings have been envisioned as the protagonists of small theatrical sets, in ongoing dialogue with their surroundings.
The project takes two directions. The first puts products at the center, with backdrops that lead visitors into an immersive vision of the object. The second is the poetics of color, not only to subdivide the spaces but also to convey emotional connections.
For example, Teatro Magico, the new table designed by the studio 967 Arch, is displayed as if it were on a true stage, made with canaletto walnut paneling, referencing the roundness of the design. The New York Suite (Sergio Bicego) sofa is bordered by wings in glass and velvet panels, different textures that grant character to the space through a dialectic of transparency and softness.
Wood, glass and velvet are the three materials that alternate, case by case, or overlap inside the store, which has intentionally been left in a desaturated natural clay finish. The settings, conceived to be modified to match décor variations, link back to another fundamental idea of Saba: to offer products for free configurations, permitting new interpretations each time, generating tableaux that speak of our personal tastes.
In short, the new store is a sort of manifesto for Saba, an assertion of the history of a brand that seeks beauty in every project, like a veil that should enhance and wrap every object created by man. Because, as Saba likes to remind us by quoting from Khalil Gibran, “we live only to discover beauty. All else is a form of waiting.”
All photos © Andrea Bartoluccio
