Wood is alive

Italian people who pay special attention to details and quality for some types of products, such as clothes, shoes, or when they need to choose a car, when it is time to decide the furniture to buy, for example the wardrobe they will install at home, they forget the aforesaid criteria and buy a product that is manufactured with lowquality materials. We never accepted the aforesaid reasoning: our furniture complies with four philosophical principles appreciated by the market, especially foreign one» – Maurizio Riva (fig. 1) started out; together with his brother Davide, he is the entrepreneur-craftsman-designer who in 1990 marked a turning point to the historical company, which had been manufacturing customised wooden furniture for three generations in the centre of the Brianza region, one of the most important furniture districts in Italy and Europe. We met him at the Riva R1920 Centre in Cantù (Como, Italy), a multi-purpose area (fig. 2). The area includes a museum (fig. 3 – historical wood processing tools are exhibited) and the show-room, which is also dedicated to temporary exhibitions about the use of wood in the most varied conditions. The four “philosophical” principles that permeate the entire life and the manufacture at Riva 1920 are the following: • wood is a natural product and must remain as such, so it has to be used with great care; • wood must be considered a live material; • solid wood – it is used by Riva 1920 in its processing activity – must be processed by using the techniques of traditional furniture making, which have currently almost completely disappeared;

• wood processing tradition must join the most modern manufacturing technologies, concerning both products and machinery, in order to keep the high quality of manufactured goods constant.

«In general, we must learn to take care of our neighbour and of the results of our work, besides defending the things we are able to do: our workers, who are skilled craftsmen, as a rule, at the end of the working day cover all semi-manufactured and products with a red cloth (fig. 15): it is a question of respect. For this reason, we supply our customers with a maintenance kit that includes, besides the finishing oil bottle, also a dust cloth, steel wool to remove possible scratches and marks, a cloth to apply the oil, gloves and the instructions to restore the finishing. We thoroughly look after our work, we collaborate with lots of Italian and foreign architects and designers, from Renzo and Matteo Piano to Pininfarina, from Michele De Lucchi to Matteo Thun, from Karim Rashid to Carlo Colombo with the coordination of our art director, Terry Dwan who, starting form the ‘90s of last century, was able to promote renovation also concerning the image of the company, which became a “design factory”, both at material and cultural levels».

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