Monica Mazzei explains the concept behind the artisan workshop, deeply ingrained in Edra

The Salone del Mobile is a unique, fantastic time, the whole world comes together in Milan, Italy gives of its best. It’s where the true value of Made in Italy can be showcased. Our products are made with fanatical care – the extraordinary structural quality and that of the materials, crucial for total comfort, and the texture of the coverings are features that need to be demonstrated, allowing our collection to be seen and touched by  the rest of the world.

Leaving Tuscany to go to the Salone was a great event that marked out our family life from the previous months. My father only came to the seaside for the last week of the holiday because the stand and the products for the fair had to be got ready – it was held in September from the 1960s to the 1990s. Then we all left for Milan. My elder brother Valerio remembers a funny story: “In 1961 I was 6 years old, and the family all went to see the 1st Salone del Mobile. I was hugely excited, I was proud to be going on my first trip in our brand-new car, I saw Milan for the first time, the shops full of toys, masses of lights and lots of other things. Entering the Salone, apart from the long lanes of shiny stands, I also saw the escalators – another huge novelty - incredible – they were impossible to resist.   I started going madly up and down – the way children do. At a certain point . . . crash!!! … I slid down all of them, every single one. I was wearing shorts, so the vertical grooves on each tread made so many dents in my legs that it made me laugh and cry all at once. 60 years on, I regard it as a real “blood pact” between me and the Salone – and I’ve loved it ever since.

My biggest wish is to be able to enjoy the Salone and all the beauty and intensity of the excitement at the fair once again. With lanes packed with people happy to be there to check out what we, the companies, are showcasing on our stands. Enjoying the city of Milan with its fine buildings, the showrooms and the art exhibitions, presenting Italy’s beauty to the world.

We have dedicated our endeavours to beauty right from the start. Technology was the first word we associated with beauty. Technology is beauty, and together they are a tool for ensuring people’s visual and physical wellbeing. The idea for the Smart Cushion, for example, invented and patented many years ago, allows us to shape the back and arm rests of our sofas precisely the way we want. It brings life to sofas, making them wonderfully dynamic, and ensuring absolute comfort. The same goes for Gellyfoam®,  a material invented and patented by Edra, which guarantees an incredibly relaxing experience. It’s precisely this extraordinary “materials technology” that makes Francesco Binfaré’s seating, such as the On The Rocks, the Standard, the Grande Soffice and the Chiara work. Their beauty, which we can admire from the outside, resides especially in the hidden, extremely high technology that makes them possible.

Massimo was a great master, we built the project for the company together. His approach was extreme at times, but equally it was necessary to be able to see different, more conceptual points of view, true design research.

Life consists of choices, of meetings and also perhaps of affinities. We don’t hedge bets. If we do something, we believe in it totally. Sometimes our choices are seen by other people as having a go or hedging our bets, but that would have been in the case of a particular project. We choose our authors first and foremost for their way of thinking. Sometimes it is they who choose Edra. Their ideas range from visionary to extremely classic. Naturally the human factor helps to keep relationships alive, powerful and enduring: that’s where affinities that are not merely professional come into it.

Zaha Hadid, an apparently tough character on the outside, was really very sweet. She was capable of designing on different scales with exactly the same sensitivity. Objects, like sculptures, that looked like fantastical micro-architecture. Francesco Binfaré is a master and is, perhaps, the greatest connoisseur of this job, making sofas and armchairs. He’s an architect, an artist, a poet, a philosopher … a real thinker who looks beyond. Jacopo Foggini has an extraordinary ability to play with light, manipulating it, making it take on different tones and brightness when it hits the material he’s working with, polycarbonate. He too is a master and an artist when he works with this amazing material, and always manages to craft it into unique sculptural shapes. Fernando and Humberto Campana are both eclectic characters, like their pieces. In their hands, materials – from the poorest to the most prestigious - acquire a new dimension and new life, as if by miracle as well as skill. Masanori Umeda is a gentle poet, with the sort of delicacy that only the Japanese culture can express.

Yes, that’s right. Our philosophy means that we create “eternally contemporary” objects. We have always produced a small number of products in quantitative terms. We devote a great deal of attention to each of them, and it takes time, years sometimes, to create every detail meticulously. Some of them are one-offs, handmade, like Foggini’s, for instance. The company does have collections, such as the  Flowers Collection by Masanori Umeda, which only consists of two pieces: the Getsuen and Rose Chair armchairs. Even our latest project,  A’mare by Jacopo Foggini is a small outdoor collection made up of basic products: tables, chairs, armchairs, a bench and a lounger, whereas the Flap sofa is a single product, and comes in one single size. We love it when these pieces break into the art world, through museums, and are recognised as real artworks.

We carried on doing as much as we could in the usual way and, thank God, we managed to keep going. We created projects and tools for communicating our products. We published Edra MAGAZINE – Our Point of View to tell people about us and allow them to really get to know us. We carried on producing, with the same quality, service and punctuality as always. We optimised our production methods and had time to do some good thinking, in a bid to improve everything we possibly could, without ever losing sight of our relationships with people.

The company is careful about its choice of materials and external collaborators. Every operation and everything we do at Edra has to be sustainable. All the products and all the materials, packaging included, are low environmental impact, as low as possible. But these are factors that should be taken for granted these days. You can’t conceive of corporate conduct that fails to respect certain obligations. What makes the difference is producing things that aren’t destined for structural or aesthetic obsolescence. Edra produces things that do not get thrown away or are not recycled. Our products are designed to last over time.