DISCOVERING MARBELLA, THE NEW OUTDOOR AND OPEN AIR COLLECTION BY PAOLA NAVONE FOR BAXTER

• YEAR: 2024

“We’re not tourists. We’re travellers.”

(The Sheltering Sky by Bernardo Bertolucci)

The catalogue entitled ‘Quaderni di Viaggio: Marbella’ opens with a meaningful quote from Bernardo Bertolucci’s masterpiece. The catalogue is entirely dedicated to the Outdoor collection designed by Paola Navone for Baxter and narrated by Andrea Ferrari’s cinematographic images.

The inspirations behind the design

This is not the touristy Marbella of boutiques and happy hours, but a place suspended in time where nature is lush and wild, afternoons are silent and still for siestas, and the shadows cast over Moorish arches promise mysteries, secrets and adventures.

A scenario that captures Paola Navone’s cosmopolitan and non-conformist spirit, where each project is a place in the world that conjures up and releases its character, exoticism and fragrance.

It features the humid tropical forests in Manila and Manao, the seating collections made from reed, the lightweight, flexible and sustainable material that characterises garden furniture.

There is the desert in the Arizona sofa, with its agile structure and nomadic vocation, and there is the ocean, where the Panama Bold outdoor seating system floats like islands, with a core of Okoumé, a particularly light and weather-resistant African wood.

But there is also Fellini’s Rimini, the Italian resort town, a place so iconic that it encapsulates all the stories of summer.

Materials and colours

The materials that make up the new outdoor furnishing collections are a catalogue of original sensations, primitive accents.

They are earthy materials such as natural terracotta, minerals such as lava stone and Palladiana Green marble, metals such as acid-etched verdigris copper, woods such as reed from the Philippines, and the ultra soft Baxter leather for upholstery.

Paola Navone says that both the camouflage pattern and the Camo Vert colour represent a view of the world:

“An idea of a map that you can look at from afar, like looking at the earth and seeing continents where you can’t tell where the water is and where the earth is.”

And if the patterns and colours of the ‘outdoor’ fabrics are strong and bold - like verdigris, blue and orange - it is because Paola Navone is a woman of character and daring explorations, both of places and of projects, and these collections tell of her boldness.

Outdoor furnishings that are large, cosy and soft, designed for spending time together, for sharing, for telling stories, but also bold and dynamic, enough to push themselves out of their comfort zone.

For Baxter, there is no such thing as a single outdoor space: there are patios, terraces, loggias, gardens and poolsides, and each one brings with it the complexity of relationships between people and space, as well as the performance demands that the structures and materials of the furniture are called upon to support.

The distinction between Outdoor and Open Air separates the more durable products intended for outdoor use, from a collection that lives outside but under cover, in a liminal space between indoors and outdoors - the Open Air.

Both are also designed to be used in the home, as the materials chosen along with the design coexist harmoniously with the indoor collection.