GIOVANNI OFFREDI

Giovanni Offredi was born in Milan in 1927 and began working in the fields of interior and industrial design in the early ‘60s. From then on, he has been collaborating with famous Italian and foreign companies, creating furniture, lamps, accessories as well as kitchens, sofas, televisions and telephones. He has also had experience designing stores and settings for trade shows. Over the course of his career, Offredi has received several awards and honorable mentions from reputable trade organizations, including three “Oscars de la Nouveauté” in Paris. Some of his creations are part of permanent exhibitions at the MoMa (New York) and the Victoria and Albert Museum (London).

Architect Giovanni Offredi died in 2007, and was succeeded by his son, Engineer Ferdinando Offredi, who has taken over design activities at his studio.

In Offredi’s designs, harmony is obtained through a careful and effective balance of proportions, and creativity free from all conventional constraints. In the forms he creates, he aims to reach an order as close to perfection as possible by eliminating all superfluous elements. For Offredi, design is the pure expression of the “reason for being” of the product. Therefore, shaping an object is an effort to give visual representation to its meaning and function. Aesthetics and utility must be two parts of the same timeless, lasting whole.

Offredi and Snaidero

In the eighties, an increasingly demanding market was calling for a new style in kitchen design. In response, Snaidero launched Abaco, an innovative range of models all bearing Offredi’s signature touch. As a result in 1984 came out KRIOS, whose elegant beauty was characterized by the absence of handles to accentuate its clean linear forms. With its contrasts of shiny colors, yellow, silver, white and slate, Krios was also the first model to break away from the concept of monochromatic kitchens.

Following was KALIA (1986), whose distinguishing feature was a joint-free, fully equipped countertop made in pre-curved plywood coated in laminate: a real cooking laboratory with large surfaces and roomy larder areas.

Then, in 1988, Snaidero left it up to Offredi to reinvent the idea of the wood kitchen. The designer’s answer was CONTRALTO, based on a contrasting game of wood, stone and steel. The use of a plastic material to create the wrinkled roughness effect of a stone surface gave the model a solid visual presence and made the old new again.

Offredi returned to Snaidero in 2008, with a new model called KUBE. Kube offers clearly contrasting shapes, materials, colors and balanced areas with separate functions, to convey a kitchen that is resistant and long-lasting yet stylishly simple and immediately identifiable. White emphasises the clean lines, while the warm tone of wood (Elm) softens the steel to complete an essential design with sober yet contemporary and dynamic forms.