To truly go beyond, one must possess an attentive and discerning eye. An eye capable of both grasping the details – because it is in the small and almost invisible that often nestles the highest concentration of beauty – and perceiving the harmonious coherence of the whole.

This visual flexibility is what sets Paola Lenti apart, and it finds its purest expression in Paola Lenti Milano, the brand’s new flagship exhibition space in Milan. Designed as a bioecological architecture, it mirrors the company’s aesthetic sensibility and ethical commitment.

Oltre lo Sguardo serves as Paola Lenti’s manifesto, marking the definitive opening of a new destination in Milan, inspired by the key principles of culture, design, well-being, and hospitality that have guided the brand since its inception thirty years ago.

At Paola Lenti Milano, indoor and outdoor products harmonize with diverse plant species across six distinct ecosystems, fostering an unparalleled urban biodiversity.

During Milano Design Week 2024, visitors are guided through sensory experiences, immersed in botanical and chromatic journeys that evoke olfactory sensations, play with light, notes of colour, and showcase furnishings characterized by delicate elegance and occasional whimsy—a hallmark of Paola Lenti’s unique storytelling approach.

Within the showroom, a dedicated space spanning over 300 square meters mimics the ambiance of a contemporary dwelling. Wide windows offer glimpses of lush gardens, inviting exploration and discovery. Carefully curated colour palettes, vintage furnishings, and meticulous attention to details create an atmosphere of sophistication and refinement.

Looking ahead, plans for a bistro and boutique hotel underscore the brand’s commitment to hospitality and well-being. These additions will further enrich the visitor experience, providing opportunities to explore broader themes of culture and sustainability amidst verdant surroundings.

Meanwhile, the building, still in its original state and subject to renovation in the future, will host the solo exhibition of Oki Sato «Nendo: Whispers of Nature» – a fitting exploration of the intricate relationship between humanity and the natural world, aligned with Paola Lenti’s core values.

© Paola Lenti srl

L'articolo «Oltre lo Sguardo» : What Lies Beyond the Gaze proviene da Paola Lenti.

Just like Azabudai Hills. Nestled in the heart of the Minato district, this newly inaugurated area spans over 8 hectares, offering a serene escape from the hustle and bustle of urban life. Here, amidst vast green expanses teeming with trees, flowers, and tranquil water features, lies a true garden-city.

Built where once stood a temple and a large park, and where daily business of florists and launderers took place, the project by Heatherwick Studio has radically changed its appearance into one of the greenest areas of the city, carefully preserving its original character. Futuristic structural forms have become the “network” that embraces residential buildings and commercial spaces, temples, art galleries, and restaurants, to recall in a contemporary key the typical architectural congestion of Tokyo, where old and new, large and small architectures are stacked against each other.

ph. © Paola Lenti srl

The ambition of the project, lasting over thirty years, was to create a public space meant to be “lived” and to succeed in involving and retaining the community that has always inhabited the neighborhood. Once the works were completed, almost all of the previous inhabitants and businesses chose to return and populate this extraordinary “three-dimensional landscape”, which has succeeded in adding something fresh and welcoming to the modern urban fabric, too often impersonal, of a big metropolis.

Right opposite the green and sustainable area of Azabudai Hills, Paola Lenti Tokyo flagship finds its new home, transitioning from the residential district of Hiroo. In partnership with Atlantic Cars Ltd., the store seamlessly integrates into the Japanese culture, reflecting the brand’s commitment to aesthetics and craftsmanship. Designed to collaborate closely with architects and interior designers, the space invites creative exploration and bespoke solutions.

The neutral tones chosen for the walls and flooring enhance those bold shades that have always been a distinctive element of the Paola Lenti collections: the green and turquoise of the lava and glass surfaces, the solar yellow and deep red of the coverings, the vibrant pink and the decided purplish blue of the weaves.

ph. © Creare Co., Ltd.

L'articolo The Garden-City of Azabudai Hills proviene da Paola Lenti.

Guerrilla gardeners plant flowers “clandestinely” in degraded places.
Mona Caron, somehow, does the same with her brush. The aim is the same as well: make the beauty flourish where there is none. Rundown districts, proletarian suburbs, anonymous skyscrapers.
However, Mona Caron, contrary to the guerrilla gardeners, sows her seeds of beauty rising from the ground and pointing straight towards the sky, because the peculiarity of his monumental works is to literally climb on the facades of the buildings, “blossoming” where the view begins to get lost against the horizon. With a magnificent visual impact.

Growing up in the woods of Switzerland, American by adoption, Mona Caron is the antithesis of the mannered artist. Her “uniform” is limited to sneakers and wide trousers, her hair tucked underneath the helmet, essential to safely create the gigantic murals that made her famous internationally.
The subject is symbolic: ordinary flowers and weeds growing spontaneously in the cities, breaking through the cracks in concrete walls. A tribute to resistance, or resilience, to use a rather misused but very current term, of those that “have no place in this world – the artist explains -, that are not part of plans, and nonetheless go on fighting and pushing to emerge”.

The series of the hurban weeds, as Mona Caron calls them, started on the walls of San Francisco, where the artist lives, and then crossed the borders of the United States and “invaded” the skyscrapers of San Paolo or gray suburban apartment blocks in Portugal and Sweden.

“I look for clandestine plant life in the city streets. When I find a particularly heroic specimen growing through a fissure, I paint it big, at a scale inversely proportional to the attention and regard it gets. Against the hardest cement, against all odds, we too can find our fissure, and keep pushing. That’s the way change happens”.

To create her murals, Mona Caron often collaborates with Brazilian Mauro Neri, her life partner, and many other artists-activists. Where she makes flowers bloom, they restore body and dignity to the invisible – homeless, indigenous, seasonal workers – portraying them in the little big daily battles. Making them feel represented.

L'articolo The artist Mona Caron: ”A flower can grow from concrete” proviene da Paola Lenti.

In the book Pianeta Oceano, biologist Mariasole Bianco describes an extraordinary ecosystem and discloses some surprising information: if it were not for the ocean, the temperature of the earth would have increased 36 degrees from the industrial revolution to the present day; 50% of the oxygen that we breathe is derived from the ocean, which is also able to absorb one third of the carbon dioxide that we produce every day. Who would have thought: a whale, during its lifetime, stores on average 33 tons of CO₂, while a tree annually absorbs less than 22 kilos. The great mammal generally feeds at the depths of the ocean, but it defecates on the surface, releasing iron and nitrogen, elements which are capable of fertilizing phytoplankton. And it is specifically phytoplankton that plays a key role in climate regulation because it, in turn, absorbs carbon dioxide and, at the end of its life cycle, it sinks into the depths, stockpiling the carbon.

In general, the ocean thus could be called the blue lung of the world. This is also thanks to its vegetation of submerged green expanses and algae. For example, Posidonia beds: in the Mediterranean, they are one of the greatest sites of biodiversity and, trapping sediments among their roots, they purify the water and fight coastal erosion.

Mangroves, along the equator, are also an ideal environment for the reproduction of millions of species, and they represent a natural barrier against coastal erosion, storm surges and rising sea levels.

What is more: have you ever heard about forests of kelp? They are brown algae, of medium and large size, capable of growing to a height of 45 meters, equivalent to at least a ten-story building: they welcome sea otters and an extremely rich ecosystem, offsetting the carbon dioxide emitted by 6 million automobiles.

L'articolo Blue Planet proviene da Paola Lenti.

In his last book, La Pianta del mondo (Editori Laterza), scientist Stefano Mancuso recalls how plants play a fundamental role in regulating climate and in the absorption of carbon dioxide, and how, while representing 85% of living organisms on planet earth, they have often been sidelined. And yet they constitute the nervous system on which the entire world in which we live is constructed, and many, so many stories begin precisely with one of them. Stories of ideals and freedom, of progress and science. But also of unparalleled notes.

The trees of music? They are red spruce.

A Stradivarius soundboard can be made only with red spruce. The famous Italian luthier built 14 violas and violins, starting with a single model. It seems that the perfect conduction of sound in this plant is due to the resiniferous micro-channels that run all along its trunk. There is more: a good tonewood requires trees with a diameter of at least sixty centimeters (between one hundred fifty and two hundred years old), and with the correct density, a characteristic obtained only through slow growth, under stabile climatic conditions at a certain altitude.

Not coincidentally, one of the secrets of great eighteenth-century violin making would seem to reside precisely in the especially slow growth of spruce trees, due to the so-called Little Ice Age, which occurred between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Music today has changed. There is the sound of the wind that, with rising temperatures, has struck down thousands of spruce trees. The 2018 storm in Trentino also damaged the forest from which wood for musical instruments has always been obtained. Not that spruce is the only wood used to build a violin. Mancuso enumerates sycamore maple, ebony, rosewood and boxwood. But he specifies: it is only from spruce that a divine sound can emerge. Anyone who has tried to play a Stradivarius knows this.

L'articolo Lymph & sounds proviene da Paola Lenti.

At the Accademia di Agricoltura in Turin, Garnier Valletti’s essays on pomology surprise in their richness and variety. They may be written in the late 1800’s but they also give food for thought on one of the most central themes in our life today: biodiversity.

How many varieties of apple are we able to recognize today? While the European Union works on shared strategies to bring nature back into our lives and promotes direct channels of distribution, Copenhagen is a shining example of urban agriculture that shortens and improves the food supply chain. The winner of the tender for the supply of apples to schools and retirement homes in the Danish capital has offered to supply 38 different types of apple fruit: this is promising news.

The Fruit Museum of Turin is an opportunity to delve into the past, and while reflecting on the role of biodiversity in our society. The museum has more than a thousand “plastic artificial fruits” made by Francesco Garnier Valletti in the second half of the nineteenth century. These fruits trace the history and scientific heritage of the Stazione Sperimentale Agraria (Agricultural Experimental Station) founded in 1871. Through this journey we witness the turning point that transformed fruit and vegetable production from artisanal to industrial, introducing new methods of cultivation, conservation, distribution and consumption.

What is most striking about the museum, besides the hundreds of varieties of pears, apples, peaches… is the culture of perfection with which these fruits were made, thanks to a patented technique.

After starting his career as a confectioner, Garnier Valletti began crafting flowers and ornamental fruits in wax and resin, attracting the interest of the Imperial Court of Vienna and then that of Tsar Nicholas I Romanov. Presented at exhibitions and competitions, its fruits win medals and awards at international exhibitions. In addition to adorning the elegant tables, the fruits were also purchased by nurserymen, fruit-farming schools, collectors and enthusiasts who appreciated their unique aesthetics.

Today these fruits continue to amaze. And they return to being valuable inspiration and notes for scholars of the genetic heritage of fruit farming.

Sources: fao.org; ec.europa.eu; National Geographic Italy; museodellafrutta.it

L'articolo Tutti Frutti<br>The apples of concord proviene da Paola Lenti.

The European Court of Auditors emphasizes how not enough is being done to combat and reverse the inexorable process of soil degradation tied to the exploitation of land and climate change. Reforestation and regenerative agriculture could make a decisive contribution. In fact, while intensive agriculture subjects the land to stress, through unsustainable chemical and mechanical processes that, in the long run, will render the soil completely sterile, the regenerative approach contributes to the reconstitution of natural cycles, improving productivity and the quality of life of farmers and animals, with a return to the well being of communities.

Daniele Cesano, a Piedmontese engineer, well established in Brazil, bears witness to this. There he has developed his Intelligent and Sustainable Smart Agro-climatic Module (MAIS), a syntropic approach capable of giving resilience and restoring fertility to lands cultivated and/or used for farming.

“In the last one hundred years agriculture has always extracted more than it has restored and with deforestation and monocultures it has fundamentally undermined the natural cycles – Cesano explains. Today syntropic processes are helping us return these cycles to an optimal energy level in order to guarantee the regeneration of the soil and its return to productivity.” All in accordance with laws established by Mother Nature.

No longer monocultures and fertilization, but layers of different plants with different functions. We start with grasses and shrubs that need little to live and grow; and from leguminous plants, “pioneers” that harbor among their roots certain batteries capable of capturing nitrogen and transforming it into substances that can be assimilated by other plant organisms. Plants succeed one another in time and space, as long as there is cooperation, and usually within a few years yield appreciable results, not only in terms of food production, but also renewed biodiversity. The beauty of this model is that it can be exported everywhere, including to Europe.

The images show farmland on the Brazilian plantation Mata do Lobo, near the city of Rio Verde, in the state of Goiàs, in the Cerrado biome. The activity of agricultural enterprises has always been the monocultural production of grains for multinationals, but given the decrease in productivity and profits, Maria Vitoria Vasconcelos and her husband have found a valid alternative in syntropic agriculture, leading to economic and intellectual independence. Today the principal crops are coffee, bananas and Australian red cedar; but there are also many other trees, for example Eucalyptus, Mango, Janbolan, as well as various indigenous species.

Sources: news.un.org; wisesociety.it, italianeconlavaligia.com, op.europa.eu, corriere.it

L'articolo Harmony and Syntropy<br> Agriculture that regenerates proviene da Paola Lenti.

In the garden, especially in my garden, we welcome emotions, exaggerations, endeavours, spirited life, fears, hopes, joy, surprise – the unexpected thus becomes part of everyday life. Welcome to my tiny meadows of spontaneous snowdrops, grown by themselves without obvious composition, and year after year, bloom after bloom, gift us with the most beautiful and repeated joy.

And how would you consider the small “natural” forest of Dove-trees that sprung up near the now-adult trees close to the stream , or the many Cornus kousa that have grown a little almost everywhere in the garden? Just as the tiny, scented, and robust Daphne boula plants, them sown and grown without human interference. All together they give us the theoretic certainty of continuity. A future full of life, an easy and natural becoming.

When the garden lives naturally, growing out of harm’s way, rejuvenating itself, it can become a resilient entity, independent from man, that will face difficulties like diseases with great confidence: The important thing is to grow a robust garden in which hope becomes certainty and the future, whether it rains or not, whether there be frost or not, or whether there be there be fungus or grasshoppers, it will be happy, serene and peaceful.

A pair of sharp shears to cut off withered flowers or revive tired shapes, a little of the spade and hoe to push back invading weeds (always lurking), and a rake to create some rich and intelligent mulching, are the primary tools for a garden that grows independently and “spontaneously”.

This is a welcoming garden, a safe home for small creatures that can live and grow there: lizards and salamanders, birds and toads, hedgehogs, and tiny country mice. It is a welcoming and lush garden, with a diverse circle of friends, who are genuine and spirited travel companions. Great and lasting benefits will come from not having abused our microcosm with treatments and poisons and not having suffocated her with anxious and dangerous cures. The fact that it is intensely inhabited is the right reward – a garden is not only a place for plants.

 From:

Paolo Pejrone, Un giardino semplice. Storie di felici accoglienze e armoniose convivenze, Einaudi, 2016.

L'articolo A simple garden proviene da Paola Lenti.

More than 70% of the surface of our planet Earth is covered in water, 95% of which is salt water. 

Francesco Bosso, a photographer born in Barletta, Italy in 1959, has dedicated his life’s work to seascapes, capturing the primal force and calmness of this environment while also encapsulating the fragile balance of its existence. 

Water, with its continuous flow and strength, shapes, transforms and creates – a continuous and eternal becoming where everything is born from water and to water it returns.

His book “Waterheaven”, published by Silvana Editoriale to coincide with the recent exhibition at Turin’s CAMERA – Centro Italiano per la Fotografia, is a journey through water’s fascinating creative force between perception and reality, a succession of recollections and fragments of memory. With his photographs, Bosso recreates distinct moods and an ambience that not only represents an ode to nature but also an invitation to reflect on the idea of conservation, with a particular attention to the liquid element, water as a primordial element and source of life. «Through the photographic medium – says CAMERA director Walter Guadagnini – Bosso communicates ethics of protection and conservation of the natural landscape. With the adept use of black and white he celebrates his subjects, and at the same time alerting the viewer to the fragility and uniqueness of this heritage». 

Water is the most precious element for the hydrosphere and even life itself. It is an integral part of the complex equilibrium that has always determined Earth’s climate. However, global warming and carbon emissions are seriously endangering this balance. The most noticeable effects are the rise in the sea level, the intensification of hurricanes, and – due to acidification – the disappearance of many species. The deterioration of marine and coastal ecosystems, though less obvious, is also a danger to the economic and physical survival of local communities. 

According to a study by the University of Melbourne, 4% of the global population will be affected by coastal flooding. While adaptability seems the only solution, with migratory phenomena and possible conflicts arising from access to resources, some people are working to try, at all costs, to reverse climate change. 

For example, the International Union of Conservation of Nature, an association with 1400 members amongst governments and citizen organizations, has committed to protect 30% of the oceans by 2030. This will be done through banning uncontrolled fishing and drilling, which will allow the sea to find itself again.

Sources: hoepli.it, theguardian.com, rinnovabili.it, woi.economist.com, iucn.org

L'articolo Waterheaven proviene da Paola Lenti.