Salvatori opens first Israeli flagship store with Blue Kitchen
03.2022
Situated near the old port in Tel Aviv’s burgeoning design district is the first Salvatori flagship in the Middle East. A joint initiative with Blue Kitchen, the new showroom seeks to demonstrate our understanding of material, attention to detail and craftsmanship to a new market of customers who share our passion for considered, timeless design. Showcasing a carefully curated selection from across the Home, Lighting and Bathroom collections, the showroom looks to connect with the city’s Modernist lineage and contemporary energy.
Founded just over a century ago on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, Tel Aviv has played an important role in the history of design. A thriving centre of contemporary design today, the fledgling city was shaped by German-Jewish architects of the Bauhaus, who came to Tel Aviv in the 1930s to escape persecution under the Nazis. As ever-increasing pressure was being placed on the school for harbouring ‘communist intellectualism’, leading it to close in 1933, the spirit of the Bauhaus flourished in Tel Aviv – the young, energetic city providing fertile ground for the optimistic International Style architecture.
Tel Aviv has grown to be Israel’s second city and a thriving cosmopolitan hub, and the White City – as the district of 4,000 whitewashed Bauhaus-style buildings came to be known – is now a UNESCO World Heritage site. A living and fiercely protected legacy of the city’s unique heritage, the White City established Tel Aviv’s internationally renowned design culture. And the traditions of the city continue to be renewed through sensitive renovations of White City apartments, projects like the elegant transformation of a historic convent into a hotel by Salvatori-collaborator John Pawson, and though the skyscrapers that are rising throughout Tel Aviv, designed by Ron Arad and Richard Meier – continually reconfiguring the city’s dynamic skyline, balancing the ancient history of the area with the creative ambition of the city.
It’s an energy that is particularly evident in the work of Ron Gilad. After over a decade in New York, where he established his playful, absurdist approach to the discipline, in 2013 Gilad moved back to his native city for the calm and the year-round sun. Approaching his work conceptually, he has produced objects that deconstruct the relationship between form and function, such as a stool that has been designed as a void, an outline of a stool; a cupboard with a shelf balancing on a miniature chair; and, for Salvatori, a series of works entitled Soft Marble.
Complementing his more artistic considerations of shape, style and material that have been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the Soft Marble collection contradicts the weight and solidity implicit to marble, offering a new way to think about the expressive and versatile medium: a vast scroll of marble, manipulated as if it were as malleable as butter; gently curved blocks that can be combined to form a room divider; a bench that appears to be formed from a flat stone slab, bent perfectly in the middle.
Cuscini – a surface that emulates the effect of fabric; a marble cushion, complete with buttons, and the fourth object from the series – is appropriately one of a range of products that will be exhibited at the new Tel Aviv store, showcasing both the work of one of the city’s greatest designers and our expertise in natural stone.