Pimar: houses and dwellings at Salone 2018

A Milano Design Week 2018, Pimar presents its new Case e Casette collection, tabletop objects made of natural beige limestone, born from a collaboration project with some iconic protagonists of Italian design: with their miniature homes, Riccardo Dalisi, Ugo La Pietra, Luca Scacchetti. The new collection aims to interpret furnishing complements and objects for the home as small, playful works of art, stone creations to experiment with the ductility of this material. The theme of the small home was developed individually by each of the three artists, during the years.

“During my visit to Pimar’s plant in Melpignano I was fascinated and intrigued by the company’s capacity to combine its natural limestone tradition with art, architecture and design. The ‘gentle stone’, so imbued with the warm, strong and deep light of the Salento region and its culture, evoked for me the defiant challenge to time that art and architecture have always posed. My fantastic little homes were so looking forward to this intimate provocation.”- Riccardo Dalisi
Made from beige natural limestone, the tiny homes by Riccardo Dalisi draw their inspiration from natural shapes, but not only. The collection includes a casaelefante (elephant-home), a casaalbero (tree-home), a cuorecasa (heart-home), a casadentrocasa (home-within-a-home), and a casatotocchio (all-eye-home), all of them conceived as small sculptures to furnish a room or to be used as bookends.

“Since the 1970s, when I saw the first Pagliare (huts with straw roofs) in the Salento region, I have dreamed of building myself a house, even a tiny one, made of natural stone. My appreciation for Pimar has enabled me to do something about this wish. Together we have created ‘Urban landscapes in Lecce stone”, the ‘Monument to Salento’, a vast collection of objects for the Cursi Museum, and many other objects. The latest creations are houses, small ones again, and while waiting for them to grow I have imagined them one on top of the other”. – Ugo La Pietra
The small houses styled by Ugo La Pietra are miniature sculptures made from beige natural limestone: vase, pagliara (hut), house and cathedral. The inner cavity in each sculpture makes its structure lighter and provides a new function, converting the little houses into graceful vases where you can grow flowers and aromatic herbs.

“Elementary, archetypical small houses to support books, letters and papers, or just be a collection pure and simple. Tabletop objects made from stone, which bring to mind the very notion of building that resides in the stone itself and the way it is processed. Simple, ordinary, threadbare homes that, in their simplified form, call to mind childhood dreams, and yet, precisely on account of their normalcy, shout against the useless thrills of so much newfangled design, expressing a definite stance on forms and their progress: only a slow and painstaking work on tradition, on day-to-day and elementary forms may give new life to research and give a collective content to our work, our objects, our homes.” – Luca Scacchetti The project by Luca Scacchetti focuses on the essential: his collection of small houses made from beige natural limestone expresses the highest formal simplification through neat, square signs. The stone is processed by means of NC machinery that can faithfully reproduce the artist’s drawing. Once made, the little houses are provided with a base in satin-finished steel. To be used as a bookend or a paperweight.