Rosalie

Plywood box cm 25x25x18h, limited edition of 99 pieces. Birch plywood structure covered in maple. Solid maple lid and ebony knob. Red aniline coloring and 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
• Ebony from Indonesia, solid wood
• Birch from Russia. Birch plywood made of 7 layers of 20/10mm with cross-grain to make the wood stable.

Processing phases:

1. The process begins with a careful selection of the wood to obtain a homogeneous effect of the color and design of the fibers.
2. The birch plywood panel is veneered with a 20/10 mm layer of maple on both sides.
3. We proceed to cut the parts that make up the box.
4. The parts are assembled by gluing and interlocking them; the horizontal joints are worked and joined by rebate; the vertical joints are made with internal wooden cores.
5. The lid of the box is built by hand turning the solid maple.
6. The knob is made by turning the ebony block by hand, after a careful selection of the trunk. The ebony trunks are small and full of defects. There is a waste of about 70% to obtain blocks of solid wood suitable for processing. The knobs and the maple top of the lid are left to rest for several months to allow further stabilization of the wood.
7. After an adequate amount of time, proceed by working the surfaces of the box by hand with cuttlefish paper and rounding off the edges.
8. The body of the box is painted with red aniline pigments.
9. We proceed with a first pass of "primer" by hand to close the pores of the wood.
10. The surfaces are then smoothed again by hand with increasingly finer sepia paper.
11. We proceed to stamping.
12. Another coat of paint is applied, with a brush, to make the surface "silky".
13. After adequate drying, a layer of natural beeswax is applied by hand.
14. The knob is fixed to the lid of the box using a hidden, interlocking cylindrical wooden pin.

NB. The processing of ebony parts requires great care, since ebony releases a black dust when raw that penetrates the fiber of other woods, dirtying them irreparably. Ebony must therefore be worked alone and separated from other woods.