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One of today’s top home design trends is a rediscovery of the materials and styles typical of past eras. Amongst these, Fifties design is coming back into vogue thanks to its timeless aesthetic, which successfully combines practicality with style. The geometrical lines of the decorations and furnishings that created bright, dynamic interiors are reappearing, but in more subdued, natural colours. Light wood finishes and widespread use of chrome-plated or painted metal combine with tactile, flawed covering materials, hand-crafted items and changeable surfaces in graduated colour shades. There’s a resurgent taste for decoration: boiserie panels, walls finished with ornamental ceramic tiles or wallpaper, and patterned fabrics and rugs. The contemporary interpretation of this look from the past is particularly rich in sensual materials.
This mix & match of references to the history of our popular material culture is driving a strong comeback by cement tiles, ideal for creating a retro mood, although one reincarnated with greater awareness of materials’ sustainability and efficiency. Cement tiles become a predominant home design feature on both floors and walls, reprising the variety of motifs and colours central to their personality and appeal. They may be used in modern interiors, to add a touch of originality or character, or in more traditional contexts, where they reinforce the beauty of a timeless design scheme. Their combination of geometrical motifs, bright colours and textures makes cement tiles ideal for bestowing individuality on rooms while maintaining a link to the past.
The Crogiolo range offers a number of alternatives for this role. The ArtCraft collection sets out to rediscover the tactile appeal of terracotta in a large assortment of small tile sizes and decors that maintain the variety and style of the traditional originals, giving the range a modern yet familiar feel. The motifs, from lozenge patterns to tone-on-tone circles and more ornate designs, mix the remembered with the contemporary and enable a continual dialogue of colours, decors and textures. The Memoria collection, on the other hand, combines the emphatic colours of white, dark blue and black with semi-matt or extremely glossy surfaces, giving an original touch to traditional geometrical or more naturalistic decorations.
Homes are richly decorated with tactile surfaces, warm materials and products with fascinating story to tell. The Crogiolo Lume collection was one of the first to transform industrial ceramics with a “hand made” look: a thickly glazed, ultra-glossy, flawed surface that gives walls a deep, iridescent colour. There’s a growing wish to return to ceramic materials in their purest form, where flaws and defects are an added value. This aim is beautifully fulfilled by the Crogiolo Terramater collection, inspired by red clays from the Sassuolo district, of 100% Italian origin and containing 60% recycled material. These ceramic tiles have an extremely glossy, tactile surface due to the inclusion in the glaze of a variety of grits, which create a vibrant, hand-crafted look that evokes memories and tugs at the heart-strings.
In today’s trend for interiors that reach back into the past, materials acquire narrative power, playing a key role in design schemes with decorative effects that enhance the most widely different contexts, from classical to contemporary, in a timeless modernity.
