You do not need to make masterpiece, you must be a masterpiece

Pure Alchemy!

Decoration workshop

The decoration workshops were born in 2012 to meet the need to achieve finished product with in­creasingly high level in order to guarantee our customers an always higher quality. Decoration process in Sice Pre­vit Company goes from classical finish of the furnishings up to innovative wall finishes which follow contemporary trends, as well as the customers’ stylistic needs. The team consists of seven decorators, each one with his specific and highly professional skills. This close-knit team is the real resource of this department. The passion that cha­racterizes our decorators and their different backgrounds allow having a greater creative capacity thus giving an ad­ded value to the entire productive process… 

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Waterborne UV curing coating for a 5 stars hotel: sustainability and high performances

Overlooking the Old City of Jerusalem, the five-star David Citadel Hotel of Alrov Group, designed in 1998 by Moshe Safdie, the Israeli architect naturalized Canadian winner of the AIA Gold Medal award, is the south side of the Mamilla Quarter, in front of the historic Valley Hinome, according to a

horseshoe plan. The outer covering is made of a rough local limestone, while the interior is covered with wood walls and wood false ceilings.

All common areas, 385 guestrooms and suites have been redesigned and spread over 8 floors of the

building, according to a design by the Italian Lissoni Associati who, by keeping the use of traditional

materials and colours complemented by other alternative ones treated in an original way, designed

the environment as a maze enhanced by the study of natural and artificial light, rich in vegetation.

A rich palette of colours, lights, textured fabrics, parts made of brass treated with different finishes joined with glasses printed on the back, with a central idea connected to the use of wood, oak for the

floor, the heat-treated eucalyptus for the walls and the furniture in the common areas and suites,

characterize and personalize all the areas, both public and the private ones of the rooms.

«The mood of each room is characterised by the prevalence of some "colours" - tells us Alessandro Simonato, manager of the office design of the Tino Sana company located in Almenno S. Bartolomeo (in the province Bergamo) who has been commissioned to manufacture all the furniture - especially the eucalyptus heat-treated dark wood, iron or burnished brass, and the "Mondrian effect" obtained with surfaces made of brass treated  in different ways, mirrors, glasses printed on the back».

Belonging to an international luxury hotel chain with high quality and surface resistance requirements

suggested Tino Sana design office to choose carefully materials and finishes.

«In the rooms – goes on Simonato – we chose, instead of heat-treated eucalyptus wood, some veneered panels with pre-dyed wood coated with waterborne UV curing paints, for "coarse", visual effect so as to enhance the matt wood».

Thanks to the cooperation of Elia Maestroni, Key Account Manager of IVM Chemicals company and the technical support of the R&D laboratory, it has been developed a coating cycle that allows to reach a surface resistance comparable to other non-wood finishes, which is an essential feature for hotel furnishing of a hotel, of course, that is subjected to large mechanical stresses and to the use of detergents for cleaning.

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Harps: artisanal historical masterpieces, waterborne coated by a cutting-edge plant

It is true that an instrument intended for high-level

professional performances, under the judgment of

an expert public, it must guarantee first of all that

the instrument has been built in order to avoid any

inappropriate sounds, but all the productive processes

we visited all even the less important, are so refined, to

understand what means a “Salvi harp”.

We ask Gabriele Dutto, manager of the company

together with we visited the company, if the coating

process of the instrument has only an aesthetic

function; he answered that: «the soundboard,

due to strings’tension- it can reach a carrying capacity

of 1200 kg-tends to deform, even if the parts needed to

built are stored in a well-ventilated and heated room

for about 4 months. For this reason coating in

addition to meet high aesthetic requirements, must be

elastic so that it absorbs the dimensional changes of

the instrument and will not “break” the film».

In brief: all the instrument components are prepared

in the joinery then they area pre-assembled creating

a “raw harp” (as we call it), whose validity is carefully

checked in order to guarantee the right functioning

(the assembly of the various components is so perfect,

that at the end it looks like a unique item).

All the components are then disassembled and coated,

to be next assembled again to built the “definite harp”, at

least in terms of structure, not yet tested in its primary

function, the sound production: the specialists of the

company (harp tuners and harpists), must do it later.

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Tradition, high technology, quality and design in kitchen

THE IMPORTANCE OF FINISHES

Quality furniture requires an appropriate coating,

which meets at the same time, protection and aesthetic

needs, especially now when architects and designers

are increasingly directed towards the use of material

“as it is”.

«We need always more to use “natural effect” coatings

–tells us Nicola Stangherlin architect.

In particular for Minà collection, which includes

modern kitchens (island or wall), which remember the

industrial style ones (with for example many details

made of cast-iron); we needed finishes reproducing

the iron effect (corten, oxidation in its

different shades, zinc).

The coatings’ role is essential: they do not only

reproduce materials, but the effects too, in addition to

have aesthetic and protective functions».

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Organic or inorganic “Patina”?

In some areas of Southern Europe among architects is widespread a material launched in the 30s b y

the United States Steel Corporation, patented under the name Cor-Ten (originally, a low alloy steel with 0.2 -0.5 % copper, 0.5-1.5% chromium and 0.1-0.2% phosphorus).

Born as a material able to self-protect from electrochemical corrosion, it changed over the years, in order to obtain good structural properties (yield strength up to 580 MPa), both characteristics that

have convinced many designers to use it, for example, for bridges’ building, first in the United States, then in Europe.

Recently architects committed to civil building urban design and other decorative applications began to use the Cor-Ten steel (in the United States, the different types available in the market are called

weathering steels) both for the belief of using a high strength material and without maintenance, and for its aesthetic appearance, regarded as the result of a “natural” aging and thus inherently “real” or “true”, and not artificially produced or modified by man as some industrial processes for surface decoration. 

Unfortunately, some of these features are more the result of a well-designed communication rather than the result of the analysis of objective figures.

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