Milan o8: designer Tord Boontje created the Little Wild Garden of Love exhibition to show off the outdoor collection of Italian furniture manufacturer Moroso in Milan last month.

The installation, at the Moroso showroom on Via Pontaccio, led visitors through a dark room where simulated rain drenched well-known Moroso products to a light and foggy room beyond, where new additions to the collection were exhibited.

New products launched included designs by Bootje, Stefan Diez and Christophe de la Fontaine, Ross Lovegrove, Tomek Rygalik, Tokujin Yoshioka and Patricia Urquiola.

Here's some more information from Moroso:

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THE LITTLE WILD GARDEN OF LOVE
Showroom Moroso 16-21.04.2008

There are many companies presenting an outdoor collection this year and one of these is Moroso, who interprets outdoor products in its own unique and original way bucking the trend and commissioning Tord Boontje to design this season’s installation, believing there is no-one better than him capable of generating the garden of our dreams.

And we find enchanted and magical nature in the Moroso showroom of Via Pontaccio, which, with the unmistakeable touch of Boontje, brilliant creator of fantastic worlds which merge the imagination and the reality, becomes “The Little Wild Garden of Love”.

The title of the installation communicates the essence and the meaning of this world, created to tell of a bold, eclectic, wild, multicultural and multicoloured collection born from true passion and fruit of the great love between the company and the designer.

Tord Boontje, interpreting nature in an abstract way, bestows us with an enchanting garden made of fabric panels, lights, colours, circles, mirrors and special effects, dividing the space into different areas which need to be dicovered, each with its own original, unique atmosphere. He describes his work in this way:

“You enter a dark place which represents night or, better still, a rainy night, where we find some Moroso pieces which are familiar to us: little Albert, O-Nest, Supernatural, Osorom, Shiitake…

The entrance is at once spectacular and dramatic. It is the place where everything begins to spring to life. After the dark and rainy, yet seductive and mysterious, night comes the reassuring and clear day.
Rainwater is the lifeblood of our garden, you then catch a glimpse of a wild and lush vegetation and enter a landscape which is larger, more airy, throbbing and bright.

Along the way you can experience different emotions by choosing different directions and visions: the peace and calmness of the serene and romantic white garden, the powerful stimuli of the psychedelic and symmetrical garden or the vibrant energy of the colourful and revitalising garden.”

Each individual space interprets and hides within the products of the Moroso outdoor collection, whose pieces were designed by Tord Boontje, Patricia Urquiola, Tokujin Yoshioka, Luca Nichetto and Massimo Gardone.

It is a new outdoor world which Moroso enters into for the first time. To discover an untouched territory where it had taken a first timid step with the production of objects such as Little Albert, O-Nest, Supernatural, Osorom… Below: Little Garden by Tokujin Yoshioka

In its magic garden, together with Tord Boontje, Moroso tackles shapes, materials, surfaces, textures and decorations. Below: Net chair by Tomak Rygalik

Tord Boontje designs Rain Collection, Shadowy Chair and Sunny Lounger, objects with graceful forms inspired by classic pieces on which he experiments material processing techniques in search of new functional, emotional, visual and tactile effects.

Rain Chair and Rain Table demonstrate an alternative method of working metal and sheet metal They have a tubular structure made of metal and plates of perforated sheet metal laser decorated with delicate patterns. Below: Bent table by Stefan Diez and Christophe de la Fontaine

The Shadowy Chair deckchair and the Sunny Lounger sun-bed, whose shapes recall the beach furniture found at the North Sea in Northern Europe in the twenties, become contemporary with the use of digitally drawn coloured patterns and woven by expert African craftsmen using coloured plastic threads.

Hidden in the garden is also a pottery vase designed by Tord Boontje, which belongs to The Other Side Ceramics series, made with a special moulding technique while the artwork is hand drawn, computer elaborated and photographed. Below: Rain chairs and table by Bootje

Patrizia Urquiola also uses weaving and, thanks to her very feminine way of experimenting continually with materials, shapes and details, always manages to astonish us by creating increasingly innovative and thrilling design concepts which only Moroso can make bring into being.

Patrizia Urquiola has designed Tropicalia the structure of which starts one of the Antibodi collection though using weaving techniques. Tropicalia comprises chaise-longue, armchair, chair, outdoor bed, swinging nest… Below: Supernatural table by Ross Lovegrove

The design envisages a tubular steel structure with complex geometrical shapes, embellished with a clever weft of threads that alternate solids and voids to a specific pattern, paying meticulous attention to detail. Below: Tropicalia by Patricia Urquiola.

Each object in the collection takes on a different personality depending on the material and the colour used. It can be made playful and cheerful by using thermoplastic polymer threads free of heavy metal and recyclable, sophisticated and precious by using leather, simple and elegant by using HT polyester double plaited cords in either one or two colours. It is a collection designed for outdoors but which, depending on the materials used, might become a sophisticated object for an interior. It is no coincidence the leather version is shown at the fair.

Equally there is Tokujin Yoshioka with his Little Garden small table, an object which communicates the simplicity, the essentiality and the poetry of his world. Little Garden is a small metal table, in two heights, with a round top that sits on a central support at the base of which a vase of flowers is inserted.

Its balance, harmony and the correct proportion of shape and material make it an apparently simple, yet extremely complex, object.

Cristophe de la Fontane and Stephan Die move towards industrial and graphic design adding to the Bent collection a small aluminium table with a round top and a central leg obtained by folding a sheet of aluminium as though it were origami.

In the “The Little Wild Garden of Love” installation we discover an evocative garden linked to the concept of innovative and avant-garde design whose excellence is represented by Moroso.

The result is an extraordinary collection of eclectic, sophisticated, original and exciting objects which, even though they were designed for outdoors, are well suited to the interior of both private and public spaces.