Into Milan: my frustrated quest for designer furniture
First published in The Scotsman’s Weekend Magazine, 18 April 1998. See explanatory note below
It was the espresso machine that started it. Staying with a friend in New York, I fell in love with her coffee maker. This was not a device that required the user to pour and plunge. It was a serious piece of machinery that looked like something from a space-age submarine. There was shiny chrome tubing, a gauge, and a Bakelite-handled pump (incidentally, it made great coffee.) Trawling around SoHo I soon cornered my prey. I was as shocked by the price as I had :been beguiled by its beauty. Smitten though I was, $450 seemed beyond the pale. How good could a cup of coffee be? But the machine was lovely.
A quick look at the box revealed that the Pavoni was made in Milan. Surely, I reasoned – it would be cheaper in Britain. Why cart it though customs and put up with electrical adapters, when a bargain could be had at home?
Do I need to describe my dismay when I eventually sourced one of these high-pressure percolators? In Britain, 4,000 miles nearer the city where it is made, the same will rush you £475. And yet, I still wanted one. Would it be worth checking out price tags in Milan itself? I knew someone who lived there. He could help.
A few days later, my man was panting down the phone. “I have found it – just as you describe – pipes and dials and handles.”
Sure enough, Italian retailers were content to sell me my dream contraption at half what I had been quoted in Scotland. Even with expense of postage, my Pavoni arrived in Edinburgh for almost £200 less that it would had I bought it from a retailer who promises never knowingly to be undersold.
But how could such an espresso machine ever be enough? The dream of visiting Milan was soon burning within me. Of course I would also be interested to see the sprinkling of Roman remains that sprout up between the tenements and motorways around the city. And I would nourish myself in the restaurants that crowd around the sides of the canals sunk by Leonardo da Vinci. But it was the prospect of an all-out, no-holds barred shopping bonanza that fired my desire. Notions of a crazy, supermarket sweep to scoop up the designer bargains of a lifetime unfolded in my mind as my plane taxied out of Edinburgh. The fact that I did not speak a word of Italian was incidental, or so I hoped.
Perhaps I should have thought about it more. Milan might be the centre of Italian design and manufacturing but it is not a tourist destination. Some guide books advise visitors to northern Italy to avoid it entirely as they traverse the plain between the Alps and the Med. The drivers of open-topped buses do not provide an amplified commentary on the main sights of streets they cruise. And in August the city closes down so completely that special by-laws require a few vendors of basic provisions to remain open so that the handful of Milanese who can’t afford a trip to the coast can buy the necessaries of life
But the very absence of tourists lends Milan a business-like feel that, along with its citizens’ dashing demeanor, is more potent by far than guided tours and T-shirt stalls. The city itself is held by an apparently magnetic pull around the Duomo – the third largest Church on earth. The monumental surrounding buildings, with their arched frontages, might well be where the Milanese now worship: between the department stores and clothing emporia is the Galleria Virrorio, a shopping arcade whose glass roof would leave any other Cathedral in the shade. But it is the Duomo that dominates.
From its roof – which to my surprise, I was allowed to clamber over – it is clear what the builders of 700 years ago had in mind. From its highest point, the entire Paderna Plain is visible. The only landmarks to match the scale and ambition of the Duomo are the Alps that rise up in the middle distance.
Before the front door is the vast square in which the city’s people meet. By the late afternoon it is packed. There are groups of elderly sports fans arguing the toss about the latest results from the Serie A; political activists prosleytising and extended families out on display. Everything seems to be done with intensity.
In was in the streets around the Duomo, crowded around everything else that matters in the city, that I found the emporia where my plastic would be punished. There seem to be more square feet of modern furniture shops in Milan than all of the British Isles put together. On every street corner are shops crammed with the consumer goods that will make it into the British shops next year, and will be copied for the mass market a few years after that.
On this basis, you can expect to see a lot of very odd-looking refrigerators in the near future. After all, why should they be merely ‘white goods’ when, with the addition of little horns they become kitchen devils? Or with massive steel handles and heavy curved doors they can evoke the meat safes of depression-era America.
You can also forget about discreetly hidden sources light in your kitchen. The coming style is to string tiny halogen bulbs from a profusion of taut steel cables.
But I was here for the big effect. And Cassina did not disappoint. The manufacturer’s flagship store, on the city’s premiere shopping street, could swallow a couple of cinemas whole. On careful observation, the curvature of the earth was evident across its polished showroom floor. And spread across it, like tiny villages dotting a vast plain, was the most remarkable collection of seating I had ever encountered. Here were the smooth lines of the office suite Frank Lloyd Wright designed for the Johnson Wax headquarters and more Mackintosh that you will find in all Glasgow’s galleries. The steel tubes and leather that Le Corbusier bequeathed to the world were there in profusion as were the stylised couches of Mies Van De Rohe and seemingly every other significant designer since.
But not a price tag in sight. No indication of the knock-down bargains despite a mannequin army of staff with no obvious interest in pitching their products. Groomed for dressage, they clipped about the showroom mincing between curved book cases and low-slung sofas. But they never stooped to return my smiles; did not care to sell the sizzle; and, never deigned to disclose the damage. I fled, chastened. The obvious implication was that if you need to ask the price, you needn’t bother.
Hot and frustrated, I turned my attention elsewhere. Just a block away is the main high-street outlet for Vitra – favoured manufacturer of the Eames, Starck and Arad. A smaller, but no less grand portal beckoned. Inside, however, there was no obvious showroom. But this time one of the Gucci-suited saleswomen was immediately at my side. Employing what I hoped was the international language of gesture, I tried to intimate that I wished to view their furniture collection.
“Ci ci”, I was promised as I was ushered down a wide flight of steps into what appeared to be the company’s boardroom. “Momento,” sang my host, as she turned on her heels and closed the door behind her. Before me was a vast oval table, surrounded by just the chairs I hoped to be offered for a few hundred lire. The minutes ticked by ominously. This too was an odd sales technique. Why had I been brought here? Had I been mistaken for an important commercial contact? Was the company’s chairman at this moment rushing to meet me in the hope of concluding a major deal? Panic set in.
After an eternity of waiting, I sneaked out, retraced my steps and dashed past the huddle of floorwalkers who I had once been pleased to see.
And the pattern started repeating itself. Blank stares in one shop were followed by incomprehension at the next. After two days’ hard slog I had amassed not so much as an ornament, much less the treasures I had hoped to plunder.
Perhaps the moral is that if you are only willing to pay Ikea prices, it is better to stick to the Swedish flatpacker. After all, if you are willing to endure the drive to Gateshead, you are bound to find something with your name written all over it.
ends
I actually traveled to Milan to cover the 1997 Milan-Sanremo cycle race. At that time, ‘mid-century modern’ furniture was little known in the UK and available from only a handful of specialist shops. A few years later, adverts for copies of Eames, Corbusier and Van da Rohe’s pieces appeared regularly in every newspaper’s colour supplement. I was encouraged to write this story, in this form, by the Scotsman’s then magazine editor, the brilliant Alastair McKay. The Pavoni coffee maker – pictured above – was bought for me by Kevin Buckley, and is still going strong, 18 years and nearly 20,000 cups of coffee later. The article pre-dates the Euro and, at that time, there was no Ikea in Scotland (where I then lived) – hence the reference to the long slog to Gateshead.