Pure fantasies

The story of Edra begins in a village just below Pisa, Italy, with a few thousand inhabitants and a traditional Tuscan cluster of furniture makers. It's the kind of place where it's common for a six-year-old to start making furniture during the summer holidays, which is how father Mazzei discovered his passion and how he has passed it on to his siblings Valerio and Monica Mazzei.

The two siblings began charting their own course in 1987, accompanied by Massimo Morozzi, known as a member of the 1960s design generation of 'Italian radicals'. The name Edra, taken from the Greek, means 'a place to meet others'. It became a place to sit, a sofa, and soon many more.

– Our history is a family history, says Monica Mazzei. My father started producing furniture in 1949. Our idea was to create a new type of company, using real research.

"The Queen of Curves made sofas as dramatically futuristic as the buildings she designed."

Edra was launched in 1987 at Galleria Marconi in Milan, with furniture by four young students from the Domus Academy. Massimo Morozzi called himself a 'gardener' and immediately set to work sowing the seeds that would blossom into Edra's magnificent collection, or Edra's garden, if you will. Morozzi found Zaha Hadid, then an unknown Iraqi architect and untested in the art of furniture design, and gave her a sofa project. The Queen of Curves made sofas as dramatically futuristic as the buildings she designed.

The golden boy Zaha Hadid was followed by stalwart Francesco Binfaré, who always wrote poetry with his sofas, and the Brazilian Campana brothers made a name for themselves with artistic creations in odd materials. Masanori Umeda fell in love with flowers and makes them look like armchairs in Edra's exotic garden, while Jacopo Foggini's plastic chairs sparkle like glass sculptures.

Edra is not a design company like the others. Monica Mazzei says that even today, five years after Morozzi's death, they still choose projects in the same way: with an open mind, a free thought that is outside the trends but still in touch with the present. She also emphasises the importance of quality: Edra works hard to research new techniques and combine them with fine craftsmanship.

– Research and innovation should always be at the centre of a 'design company'," says Monica Mazzei. But you see sofas that are all similar, if not pure copies, even of our products. Everyone should find their own way instead. And that's the amazing thing about Edra: that they dare.

At a time when market research, rather than creativity and will, drives the product range, it has become surprising that there are still Italian furniture companies that are not afraid to stand out. Who instead, in the words of Monica Mazzei, have approached the profession with "love, passion, commitment and a constant concern for everything, with everyone, for everyone."

Edra is also not afraid to comment on the present. Like the Russian-red Tatlin sofa, created in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall fell, inspired by Soviet artist Vladimir Tatlin's spiral tower (on display at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm). A sofa made to be the centre of attention, but how do you actually sit on it? "A pure creative gesture", as its creators Roberto Semprini & Mario Cananzi call it.

And if Tatlin celebrated the fall of the wall, so is Pack, dreamed up in 2017 by Francesco Binfaré as a reaction to the new virtual walls that have risen around us. The base of the sofa is a metaphor, a polaris bursting and drifting. On top of the sparkling ice rests an abstract, soft and white bear that is there to support, embrace and be embraced, to invite people to find new social behaviours. In troubled times, you can't help but think that's exactly what the world needs, right? A warm bear hug.

Written by Sofia Hallström

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