Patricia Urquiola, the Spanish-born designer, was driving to the airport at 7am last May when her cell phone rang. Chatting in her animated way, despite the hour, was Patrizia Moroso, creative director of the Italian furniture company Moroso.
“Patrizia is like my sister. She knows she can call me at any hour,” Urquiola says. “We’re like best friends. I say this with my hand on my heart: I always want to give her my best effort.”
Patrizia Moroso, 52, runs her business with an emphasis on just that kind of infectious partnership. Twenty-one years after joining the family firm, she has transformed it from an old-line upholstery business to a forward-looking furniture label known for inventive collaborations with established designers like Ron Arad, Marcel Wanders, and Ross Lovegrove and for casting a spotlight on new innovators like Urquiola and Tord Boontje.
The Moroso booth at trade shows like the Milan furniture fair has come to be seen as a reliable place to raise a wet finger to the wind. Editors and designers head there with the expectation of finding something original, and they are rarely disappointed.
For all its sizzle, Moroso is in some ways still an old-fashioned family outfit. Patrizia’s parents, Agostino and Diana, started the business as newlyweds more than 50 years ago, and they continue to be a daily presence in the Moroso factory in Udine, an hour north of Venice. After the Italian economy faltered in the late 1970s, they summoned Patrizia from art school in Bologna and installed her as creative director. (Her brother Roberto runs the business side.)
By American standards, Moroso is a mid-size manufacturer with $47 million in annual sales—half residential, half for cruise ships, hotels, and offices. Moroso’s long-term ambition is to become a global design brand. With that in mind, this spring it opened its first store, a 3,800-square-foot space in New York’s SoHo neighborhood designed in part by Urquiola. Called Moroso at Moss, it is another of Patrizia’s highly personal collaborations, this time with Murray Moss, the most influential retailer of high design in the U.S. On the eve of Moroso’s American beachhead, we asked Patrizia about family, friendship, and the female struggle in the male-dominated world of Italian furniture.
For me it’s obvious. When I find people with a distinctive sensibility, of course I want to work with them—and I want to be friends with them too. It’s not a rational thing. It’s just like when you meet somebody at a party; you can tell immediately if they could possibly become a friend. In other words, the first impression is always the right impression. When a designer has a particularly personal approach—even if they don’t know where they’re going—I feel a kind of urgency about letting them do something. I try to help them, but of course I’m helping myself too.
I love to find designers who are unknown and take them to paradise. Four years ago I found this young man, Tord Boontje, working in London. He was a little crazy, but so special and different. He had only done two things—a chandelier for Swarovski and one for Habitat. What impressed me was that the one you can buy for ten pounds was as
graceful as the one dripping with crystals. I knew I had to meet him.
When you help someone cross over from another field, you know you’ll create something that didn’t exist before—a new baby. Often it’s just a question of getting off the main highways and exploring smaller roads.
This year, for example, we worked with Nipa Doshi and Jonathan Levien, an Anglo-Indian couple who are trying to create a mixture of culture and experience. I told them I wanted the best of the West and the best of the East. The English part of their work is highly classic, and it’s combined with the Indian tradition of hand embroidery. That’s what I find beautiful: to put the old with the new and the new with the old. We’re also working with Tomita Kazuhiko, who is designing pieces upholstered with traditional kimono fabrics that have been made in Japan for five centuries. It’s another way of putting a bit of tradition into new designs.
Italians are just starting to talk about it, and unfortunately we’re often the last to adopt such things. I can only speak for Moroso, which is already fairly green. We were the first furniture manufacturer certified by the environmental agency of the Italian government, and we go out of our way to eliminate waste. Almost all of our fabrics are natural. The leftover fabric goes to kindergarten classrooms. All the plastic is recycled, and we’re experimenting with a new material made from a mix of wood and polymers. Of course, our materials have to be not just good, but good to look at.
You’re right, but it’s changing step by step. It’s like architecture. The architecture schools are full of fantastic women working hard—maybe harder than the men—but the firms inevitably have men’s names on the door. It’s never affected me very much. I was born into a furniture family, and my parents were both involved. I don’t like to manage a company with power, the way men do. I like to work in teams, and I try to be friends with the people I work with.
Italy is still the leader in furniture production. It’s a guarantee of quality, and it allows us to be near all the industry research. Italy is the starting point, but my thinking is global.
It’s not a bad thing; it allows them to understand more about production. It’s very common in places where there aren’t enough companies to produce their ideas, so designers have to do it themselves. It’s changing the meaning of design. You can’t produce many objects without an industry behind you. What’s emerging could be called “artistic craftsmanship.” Italian designers are losing a lot of that special hands-on knowledge, which is why so many Italian companies are working with foreign designers.
