Zita

«I wanted to design boxes to open, taking care to lift the lid slowly with two hands, as if the box could feel that I am kind to it and that I don't want to mistreat it in the slightest. Boxes made with precious woods where you can put even slightly secret things: a special brush, some special paper notebooks 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 take on when we use them for a very specific reason.

Rosalia , Agnese , Teresa , Zita and Agata are the names of the five wooden boxes offered 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 take on when we use them for a very specific reason. Five extraordinary interpretations by Ettore Sottsass of a traditional material such as wood, in the highly iconographic language that distinguishes this great designer.

Material:

• Local maple Europe, worked in solid wood

Processing steps:

1. The processing of the box begins with a careful choice of solid maple wood to obtain a homogeneous effect of the color and pattern of the fiber.
2. We proceed with the hand excavation of the solid maple according to the drawing.
3. Once the different faces and the bottom part have been obtained, the parts are glued and joined together, the horizontal parts are worked and joined by tapping; the vertical joints are made with internal wooden cores.
4. The lid of the box is hollowed out from the solid wood to create the closing stop; the protruding slats are fixed one by one on the lid via hidden internal wooden cores.
5. After adequate time, proceed by working the surfaces by hand with sepia paper and rounding off the edges.
6. The box is manually colored with yellow aniline pigments.
7. We continue with a first pass by hand with a brush, of a "primer" to close the pores of the wood.
8. The surfaces are smoothed again by hand with increasingly fine cuttlefish paper.
9. We proceed with stamping.
10. Another coat of paint is given, with a brush, to make the surfaces "silky".
11. After adequate drying, a layer of natural beeswax is applied by hand.

NB. all the parts of this box, before being assembled, are left to rest for several months, in order to make the wood more stable.