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exploring taste—santa margherita gruppo vinicolo people —enrica cavarzan and marco zavagno

“In the end, all our projects are born in the kitchen, after we’ve put the kids to bed and cleaned up.
In fact, our new house is designed around the kitchen, which for us is an essential meeting place.
It’s the place where we reload and work simply becomes a pleasure.”

looking for the insanity of perfection linked to chaos. Our work is very diverse, but always specific, our projects are
all in the same boat and joined by the same thread.
mz: The potter’s wheel can achieve perfection because the form
is created around a rotating axis and is always smooth and per- Venice is a city with a very strong and unique identity,
fect. We would like reality to be the same, but it never is, there what made you choose it?
is always an unexpected variable. So our shapes are inspired by mz: I’m from Trieste and Enrica is from Castelfranco Veneto. It
perfection, but seek spontaneity. We want to translate this idea was the natural choice. Most designers are based in Milan, but
to the project. Almost perfect forms, always different, that rep- we decided to stay here, even if Venice is a complicated city. De-
resent the ordinary. spite being an island, thanks to the Biennale and other major
foundations, it offers international exposure without losing its
How do your projects take shape? authentic local identity.
mz: Each project has its own story and its own design; we try not
to make any distinctions in advance. Production techniques ec: Venice is beautiful and magic and still has this neighbor-
teach you to think outside the box and to take different paths hood feel to it, its habits are part of a life that we aren’t used to
depending on the limits of industrialization, but it all depends any more and that we don’t really want miss out on.
on how the user perceives the object. Objects convey emotions.
You can spend five euro and buy a jug from Ikea or spend 50 What, if any, has been your favorite project? Perhaps one
and have a handmade pitcher. Often objects are not only chosen that was particularly difficult to realize?
because they are necessary or cheap, but because you fall in love ec: One was definitely the pitcher. We kept thinking of these
with them and see a memory in their shape. We try to work with jugs, we designed at least eight hundred, maybe a thousand,
these ideas of forms, memories and meaning, which is at the ba- but we were never able to unite the two shapes, the grip and the
sis of everything. Then if we are able to apply this tailor-made pitcher, the container and the handle. We had the idea of serv-
concept on an industrial scale, all the better. Even though these ing from a bottle.
objects are handcrafted, they are not just for the elite, they are
affordable. Then there is the question of finding the right form, mz: In the end we cut everything back to the essential, simply
the meaning that makes you want to purchase the object. attaching a handle to a bottle, as it is. It was probably the most
basic and obvious solution, when you think about it, but with-
ec: Our studio is characterized by the “tailor-made” concept, out designing anything new, we took the archetypal shape of
not only because we target a niche market, but also because at the bottle, attached a handle, and from two ancient forms we
a design level we are very attached to each individual project. created something different.

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