The automotive brand that perfectly matched the challenge of this year Milano Design Week was, in my humble opinion, Peugeot. They presented indeed excellent examples of furniture, design and art, at the right place, the right time, the right spirit.
Excellent examples of avant-garde creativity banking on cultural traditions, natural materials, craftmaship modern technology, artis’t freedom and design discipline.
The French company has indeed an advantage over most of its “colleagues”: their own “Peugeot Design Lab” created in 2012 under the direction of Monsiuer Gilles Vidal, design director of the car brand and now also head of the “Design Lab”.
I would have loved to also see in Milano an exhibition of BMW’S long established, and very productive, DesignworksUSA this year but the BMW Group seems to have missed the chance. Let’s hope they will be there next year.
The Peugeot Design Lab, an autonoumous department with the company, has created a series of very intriguing and sophisticated “design works” that can be considered unique works-of-art and masterpieces of craftmashift and most updated technologies. They have not been engineered for mass production. They have the potential of becoming “multiples of art” values at prices that are indeed multiples of a popular Peugeot automobile or motorbike. Most spectacular examples: the 135,000 Euro ONYX sofa and the Playel piano which price has not been revealed yet.
