Loro Piana Interiors opened a flagship store in Milan this past Spring that is designed for the public to experience the designer brand’s renown furniture, textiles, and accessories. The store is located at Loro Piana’s new headquarters at the Palazzo Cortile della Seta, and features a special installation timed for Milano Design Week, which runs through June 12.
The flagship follows the global growth of Loro Piana Interiors, which was launched in 2006 with the goal of creating interiors with the same innate elegance, unrivaled quality, and practicality that Loro Piana offers in its fashion apparel and accessories.
Loro Piana Interiors’ primary business was in the b-to-b market where the brand gained favor among leading interior decorators and architects as well as with showroom operators, furniture makers and distributors and in a host of industries including hospitality, private aviation, automotive, and in ship building.
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With this flagship, end-user consumers can fully experience the brand in an elegant and intimate way. It also represents the evolution of a typical showroom.
Francesco Pergamo, Director of the Loro Piana Interiors Business Unit, said the “new store in via della Moscova represents a dramatic change: the new space sees the transformation of the showroom into a store, for the first time open to the public and where finished products, accessories, furniture and fabrics can be approached also by end-use customers.”
“Moreover, the space has windows overlooking Via della Moscova, one of the most central streets of the city, with great visibility. This becoming a ‘visible space’ from outside is strictly tight to the idea of approaching Loro Piana Interiors to the final consumers, and increasing its awareness also from a b2c perspective,” Pergamo said. “The new space is also the perfect place to present new product categories and to demonstrate the Loro Piana Interiors way of seeing a home, its rooms, and spaces.”
Regarding Milano Design Week, Pergamo said there is an extraordinary opportunity “to invite more and more people to visit our new home in via della Moscova, knowing that the store will be always open, and an impressive installation is set in our Cortile della Seta, featuring Raphael Navot’s brand new project for Loro Piana Interiors.”
“It’s an incredible exposure and we really look forward to being part of the kermesse of the Design Week with our own message and our own way of interpreting the collaboration with a great designer,” Pergamo said. “For us, this means shared values, starting point from textile, elegance, spontaneity, and authenticity. Seeing it presented from such an original and fascinating perspective is exciting.”
Inside the flagship, Loro Piana Interiors fabrics are used for decorative panels on the walls and for the furniture upholstery. As expected, the finest noble fabrics are featured such as cashmere and wool, which are also displayed in the custom-designed hanging lamps. And the custom designed furniture is made from the finest oak wood — in both the brand’s traditional natural light-coloring and in a darker finishing, which is design to create elegant contrasts.
The floor is resin, presenting a touch of contemporaneity while the ceilings feature the brand’s “carabottino” structure, which is remindful of the Loro Piana stores — and the same motif is recurrent in other elements. The store also carries all the brand’s furniture offerings, including the Ginza line and Delight Chairs as well as heritage pieces such as the Sedia Sarto con Maniglia chairs. The latest original designs will also be unveiled at the store.
Regarding design inspirations, Pergamo said the furniture have been “all designed with comfort, functionality, and versatility in mind. The first ones, our heritage pieces, like the Sedia Sarto con Maniglia, or the Poltrona Piazzetta or the little St. Germain Poufs, were conceived as ideal ‘mannequins’ to wear our fabrics, our first proposals of real objects that could show an application of our fabrics.”
Pergamo said these are easy pieces, totally timeless, and they are at ease in many different situations while also being extremely qualitative, and hand crafted by skilled artisans. The pieces can be mixed and matched with the fabrics within the same object, encouraging creativity.
With accessories, such as throws, blankets and cushions “and now to the new proposal for the table and bathroom, the starting point is always the material together with color and the tactile sensations that they arise,” Pergamo said.
“In the years we have played with weights, patterns and also with personalization, giving our customers the possibility to choose the sizes, colors and finishing of throws and cushions,” he explained. “When we talk about the bathroom and table, again the beginning is in textile. We added a little touch of cashmere to the cotton of the honeycomb fabric chosen for the bathrobes and towels, to enhance softness and pleasure, and we have played with our linen fabrics for the napkins and placemats in a very consistent approach.”
This attention to quality, detail, creativity, and craftsmanship is demanded by Loro Piana Interiors customers because they are discerning consumers. But who exactly is the Loro Piana Interiors customer?
Pergamo described the end-user customers coming to the store as having the same attributes as customers of its fashion products. Pergamo said they have a “passion for quality and excellence” and are connoisseurs with an international aesthetic. They are yacht and private plane owners, and “owners of residences all over the world, sensitive to comfort, elegance, willing to have the possibility to choose and personalize.”
“That’s why we consider Loro Piana Interiors as a natural expansion of the Loro Piana brand,” he said. “In furnishings and home textiles they search all the pillars on which our brand has been founded. They look for what they find in the clothes they wear, and this was also the founding philosophy of Loro Piana Interiors.”
There’s also another dimension to the store, one that elevates the shopping experience. “We like to call our new store in via della Moscova our home,” Pergamo said. “It’s home in many aspects: there are comfortable areas where to seat, have a conversation, choose, select, create. We have a more technical area with all our collections, it’s cozy, warm and shows various applications of our fabrics and products.”
Pergamo said the flagship store is the perfect place “to make our customers have a Loro Piana Interiors experience, to let them have a sensation of how a Loro Piana Interiors home could look like, not necessarily in terms of the single pieces, but in terms of atmosphere.”