Agnes

Plywood box cm 18x18x23h, limited edition of 99 pieces. Structure in birch plywood covered with three layers of rosewood. Knob and base in linden. Blue aniline coloring, wax finish.

"I wanted to design boxes to be opened by taking care to lift the lid slowly with both hands, as if the box could sense that I am kind to it and that I do not want to mistreat it in the slightest. Boxes made of precious woods where you can put things that are also a little secret: a special brush, some notebooks of special paper or more simply something that I would like to remain secret. Maybe notes from lovers."
Ettore Sottsass

Ettore Sottsass designed Scatole Segrete for Numa, in plywood: five small architectures that express a very personal vision of the value of things: that symbolic value that certain objects full of meaning can assume, when we use them for a very specific reason.

Rosalia , Agnese , Teresa , Zita and Agata are the names of the five wooden boxes proposed in 99 numbered copies. Five small architectures that express a very personal vision of the value of things: that symbolic value that certain objects full of meaning can assume, when we use them for a very specific reason. Five extraordinary interpretations by Ettore Sottsass of a traditional material like wood, in the strongly iconographic language that distinguishes this great designer.

Material:

• Maple from Europe worked in solid wood
• Rosewood from Madagascar
• Birch from Russia. Birch plywood composed of 7 layers of 20/10 mm with cross-grain to make the wood stable

Processing phases:

1. The process begins with a careful choice of wood, which becomes laborious especially for rosewood since the grain pattern must have a certain continuity on the various faces of the object.
2. The birch plywood panel is veneered with 3 layers of rosewood, 6/10mm thick each.
3. We proceed to cut the parts that make up the box.
4. We continue with the gluing and interlocking of the parts; the horizontal joints are worked and joined by rebate, the vertical joints are made with internal wooden cores. Extreme care is required in assembling the facades which must have continuity of design of the wood grain.
5. The base and knob are cut from solid maple and left to rest for a few months to further stabilize the wood.
6. They are hand painted with aniline blue pigments.
7. After an adequate amount of time, we proceed to treat the surfaces: we go over them with cuttlefish paper and round off the edges.
8. We proceed with a first pass by hand with a brush, of a "primer" to close the pores of the wood.
9. The surfaces are then smoothed again by hand with increasingly finer sepia paper.
10. We proceed to stamping.
11. Apply another coat of paint with a brush to make the surface "silky".
12. After adequate drying, a layer of natural beeswax is applied by hand.
13. The knob and base are fixed using hidden interlocking cylindrical wooden pins.

NB- The processing of the colored parts poses particular problems of handling, since the aniline pigment color is particularly invasive. The processing of the colored parts therefore occurs at different times and in different spaces compared to the rest of the production.