ambiente – decorate life

Designed by Stefano Giovannone with Rumiko Takeda in collaboration with the National Palace Museum of Taiwan for A di Alessi 2008.

A bit like a group photo of a Saturday-morning cartoon’s cast, Stefano Giovannoni and Rumiko Takeda’s OrienTales designs are actually bone-chine tableware invented for Taiwan’s national palace Museum: each hand-finished piece represent an Asian language or symbol.

The Banana Kid monkey is a sugar bowl, Lilt Bird holds soy sauce, lotus is a dessert bowl, Goldfish is an egg cup and the Paradise Bird is a milk pitcher.

This new family of object is part of an ongoing collaboration with the National Palace museum in Taiwan, which began in 2007 with the Chin Family. In fact, the museum set Stefano’s immagination racing, inspiring him to explore the millennial tradition of Chinese applied arts and develop his contemporary interpretation of them. 

This interpretation is keeping with the playful style of which our designer is an acknowledged master. A characteristic that, in these designs, takes a very new form. Just like the objects in the “Chin Family”, each piece performs the roles of domestic household objects and is, in part, hand-decorated. The magic of Giovannoni’s design lies in the fact that these objects recall the grace of 18th century ceramic trinkers, while continuing to be utterly contemporary!

All the pieces are in fine bone-china, melamine or thermoplastic resin, and all are hand-decorated.