by VIENNA — A sun-drenched courtyard punctuated with rockets of foliage beckoned us off the streets of Vienna into an inviting, contemplative showroom space that is the flagship store in Austria for the high-end furniture company Paola Lenti.
Earlier this month in this column, we celebrated the many women in furniture design who have influenced how we live and work and play. This week, we look at two sisters making a huge impact in furnishings. Paola and Anna Lenti are doing it by marrying advanced color theory with high-tech textiles for a lineup of indoor and outdoor furniture that is a favorite among owners of luxury super-yachts, upscale hotels and high-end consumers.
If the Paola Lenti brand was new to us, it is still fairly new to Vienna, as well. The 8,100-square-foot store just marked one year since opening as part of a retail complex called The Treasury. Research later revealed that The Treasury occupies the historic Palais Harrach, a Baroque palace once owned by Austria’s noble Harrach family in Vienna’s Freyung district known for art galleries, antique shops and high fashion.
The Vienna showroom is designed to put indoor and outdoor spaces in conversation with one another with fully vignetted furniture collections in colors that connote nature and the natural. Many of the collections are designed to live equally well inside or out or somewhere in between. The store also sells garden design by and plant life from the greenhouses of Austria’s Kramer and Kramer, which has artfully placed greenery throughout the room presentations. Many of the statement plants are displayed in large marble planters from natural stone source Breitwieser, also an Austrian company. Breitwieser also supplies the marble patio appliance pieces on display in The Treasury courtyard.
The store also features a materials library where customers can experiment with fabrics, stone and the company’s signature colorways. And customers will want to spend time with Paola Lenti’s color options; they are rich, sophisticated and prismatic. In fact, I couldn’t name the colors I saw because there is nothing in any one color. The fabrics and frame covers are more suggestions about color or meditations on color, fabrics that reflect color differently depending on where you are standing or sitting in the room and upon what time of day it might be. Trippy!
To pull this off, Lenti has developed a catalog of 70 solid colors from which as many as 500 variations can be mixed. Since childhood, founder Paola Lenti has experimented with pigments that you can now see in the proprietary yarns in her upholstery, accessories and rugs.
Planting a flag in Milan
Paoli Lenti is also on the move in her native Italy. She used the Milano Design Week in late May to open a company-owned showroom in Milan, the company’s 11th store worldwide. The eponymous company moved headquarters and production to the manufacturing center of Meda just north of Milan in 2009, so it is no surprise to see a major retail space here, as well.
Like The Treasury, the Milan showroom integrates indoor and outdoor and all of the in-between spaces with foliage peeking through open-air windows and sight lines that connect interiors with the gardens that surround them. The Architectural & Design Network has some terrific photography of the new showroom, a tour that features nearly 40 photos, many of them by the commercial photographer Sergio Chimenti.
Located in what was an industrial park in the Maciachini district in north Milan, the Paola Lenti showroom was designed to minimize environmental impact, according to the company. Green roofs, native plant life and sun-reflecting glass are some of the design choices for the 40,000-square-foot complex, which also houses a restaurant, hotel and a contemporary art gallery.
“I want the new location to be a lively place where people can feel good, a positive oasis for Milan, as well,” Paola Lenti said.
The Milan showroom joins a stable of retail spaces that includes those in Los Angeles, Miami, Sao Paolo, Seoul, Tokyo, Johannesburg, Montreal, Vienna and, as of April, Melbourne and Sydney in Australia.
Milano Design Week
Also headlining at the Milano Design Week was a new outdoor sectional seating system designed by long-time collaborator Francesco Rota, a collection in teals, blues and greens called Santorini. The collection is called a seating system because of the “compositional freedom” its various pieces offer in terms of configurations and uses.
Designed for big spaces, Santorini includes two- and three-seat sectional modules, a large platform and a round pouf that can be “easily reoriented into large islands for rest and conversation,” according to the company. The ash frames are covered in fabrics that can be removed for cleaning.
Santorini will fit in nicely in the Vienna store, based on what I saw there. The collection’s versatility, beachy blue colorway and functionality in terms of caring for its covers all make a lot of sense for the brand.
Also new at Design Week was the Kyo sofa in Felce, an outdoor fabric with stylized fern leaves in pink and fuchsia, and three side tables.
Back of the baseball card
It wasn’t easy finding out specific or granular information about the Paola Lenti story and brand. A lot of what I found is gauzy, impressionistic and idealistic, which all are hallmarks of marketing for high-end names. However, a feature in The Australian Financial Review by Stephen Todd that published just a few months ago served up some good tidbits.
For example, CEO Anna Lenti is a former nuclear engineer in aerospace, which helps to explain the high-tech fabrics and the execution of Paola’s color sophistication. Take Paola’s mastery of color and marry that with high-performance textiles developed by Anna and you get the Paola Lenti line of outdoor that is unlike any other in the marketplace.
Popular pieces include plump Pod lounge chairs, Tobit woven ottomans, the Orbitry capsule that encases its sitter, tables fashioned out of lava stone from Mount Etna, and lanterns woven in Paola Lenti’s signature rope cabling.
“We think of the collections as mini scenografia,” Anna Lenti told Todd. “Textiles, timber, ceramics, enamels — they all work together.”
The Lentis were in Sydney earlier this year to attend showroom openings in Melbourne and Sydney. Paola founded the company in 1994; Anna joined as CEO in 2000. Trained as a graphic designer and set designer for fashion, Paola Lenti brings a visual artist’s flair to the high-tech textile world of outdoor fabrics. Beginning with rugs, Paola Lenti branched out into furniture in 1997 when she first partnered with Rota, a now-renowned designer and architect with whom the Lentis have collaborated for 27 years.
As it marks three decades, the company is approaching $70 million in annual sales, according to Todd, with 20% of that total generated in Italy. The factory in Meda employs more than 120.
