Paola Navone, born in 1950, co-founded the OTTO design firm and has made significant achievements in interior, product, and graphic design, as well as art direction, collaborating with multiple brands. She is also a designated designer for Baxter.
During this year's Milan Design Week, Baxter's outdoor furniture showroom on Via Turati has undergone a transformation, highlighted by the unique Blue Garden designed by Paola Navone. Featuring her signature shades of blue, ranging from deep blue to midnight blue, it evokes nighttime scenery. The outdoor collection is characterized by its lightweight, soft materials that blend leather with various other materials, emphasizing outdoor comfort. Baxter relentlessly pursues innovation and quality, aiming to create coherent and creative indoor-outdoor spatial experiences.
Paola Navone is presented at Baxter's outdoor product showroom, Blue Garden, with her signature short hair and dressed entirely in cobalt blue, including her hair and translucent blue glasses. When discussing the core themes of Baxter's 2024 outdoor collection, Navone openly expresses her love for blue, viewing it as a symbol of her personal world. She finds irresistible allure in perceptions such as the ocean, sky, fluid states, and transparent forms, and she never rejects signals from the outside world. She loves interacting with people and connecting with her surroundings. Therefore, when she received Baxter's collaboration invitation, a strong thought quickly formed in her mind: allowing Baxter's classic leather materials to better convey warmth, liberating them from the stereotypical perception of leather being cold and hard in automotive or office spaces.
Thus, Baxter became the first company to apply fabric handling techniques to leather furniture. Techniques mastered in the fashion world (such as exposed edges and visible stitching) were successfully applied to leather sofas, giving them a unique visual warmth and charm. Facing the challenge of not being able to extensively use leather in outdoor environments, Navone introduced fabric and collaborated with Rubelli to design camouflage fabrics suitable for outdoor use, cleverly incorporating Baxter's leather craftsmanship into the sofa's rolls.
This is a testament to Navone's decades of profound experience and adventurous spirit. Of course, the world is constantly evolving. The era of technology and artificial intelligence has arrived, and Navone is eager for young designers to bring new expressions and creativity through the integration of technology and design. Just as the Industrial Revolution provided conditions for mass production in the design industry, she believes that technology and artificial intelligence will also be appropriately applied. This aligns with the nature and responsibility of designers, and the younger generation should possess the ability and proficiency to use these cutting-edge elements. "Today, we urgently need to strive to find new driving forces in the industry."
From her birthplace in Turin to her second home in Milan, Paola Navone has traveled the continents of the world, including living in Hong Kong, China for 20 years. She has absorbed the customs and cultures of the places she has visited and stored them in a vast memory bank, ready to be accessed at any time in her creative work. Eclecticism has naturally become her creativity, and order is the result of experience and taste; visual and tactile are the tools she carries with her. If asked where the softest place in her heart is, Navone would point without hesitation to a seat woven from rattan vines, combining Southeast Asian style with leathercraft, which she deeply loves. In her prolific career, if there are any wishes left for her, Navone would laugh heartily and say that everything she has not yet tried is a dream, such as participating in projects related to porcelain in China.
Paola Navone's new outdoor series created for Baxter blends the brand's soft leather with various materials, extending comfort from the inside of furniture to the outside, "aiming to allow people to enjoy the pleasure of napping outdoors."
by Giada Ying Huang