SCATOLE SEGRETE - ZITA

Solid wood box cm 18x18x21,5h, limited edition of 99 pieces. Structure in solid maple carved from solid wood. Yellow 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

Processing phases:

1. The processing of the box begins with a careful selection of solid maple wood to obtain a homogeneous effect of the color and design of the fiber.
2. We proceed with the hand carving of the maple block according to the design.
3. Once the different faces and the bottom part are obtained, the parts are glued and fitted together; the horizontal parts are worked and joined by rebate; 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 edge; the protruding slats are fixed one by one to the lid using hidden internal wooden cores.
5. After an adequate amount of time, proceed by working the surfaces by hand with cuttlefish 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 then sanded again by hand using increasingly finer cuttlefish paper.
9. We proceed to stamping.
10. Another coat of paint is applied, with a brush, to make the surfaces "silky".
11. After adequate drying, a layer of natural beeswax is manually applied.

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.