Q&A: Discover the Designer Collections by RAK Ceramics

What inspired the collections?
RAK-Cloud, born from my love for sculpture, soft and organic and sensual lines, and marries with a speech that I have been carrying on for some time, in fact I designed a tap for Gessi, which is called Equilibrio and is inspired by the stones and nature. Identical process for my perhaps most famous project, in the world of light, with the Pirce suspension lamp, made for Artemide. While RAK-Petit is a specific request addressed to the architectural world, the need to combine washbasins in confined spaces, which do not renounce glamour, and the elegance of solutions that can be developed in larger spaces.

What was the design process?
All my projects are born on paper. I like to explore different solutions quickly and instinctively. On paper I already imagine the finished volumes, identify the solutions that convince me most, 3D model the whole collection in order to have a coherent overall picture. I submit it for technical verification, from which I receive the feedback that I transfer to the collection. Then we proceed to 1:1 scale prototypes and if everything works, it goes to final production.

What is unique with these designs?
There is a word in English, which does not have an exact equivalent in Italian, and it is understatement, which for me means creating a proposal, made of elegant but not screamed details, to give rise to unobtrusive, timeless proposals. A careful search for volumes and proportions, combined with cuts in the surfaces to create dynamism and at the same time sensuality, in an environment such as the bathroom increasingly inserted in a modern and contemporary living context, completes the number of projects.

What inspired the collections?

RAK-Variant, like many of our projects, was born on the basis of a specific material. In this case, ceramics, a material, whose production must combine two supposedly distant worlds: the serial production, precise and standardized; but also a need for manual sensitivity, which cannot be ignored.

What was the design process?

Designing is never a linear path and very often, in one single project we have to process, bring order and translate all the different thoughts that flow together into actual products.  In the specific case of RAK-Variant, we set ourselves the goal of achieving a formal synthesis that would allow the collection’s various elements to be easily integrated into different types of interior. In order to achieve this, we played around with the balance between the expressiveness of a product and its attribute of being consciously silent.

At the same time, we focused on some details that convey the quality while enhancing the intrinsic beauty of the ceramic material itself. The result is a collection of 25 basins in different shapes and dimensional variations that offer multiple installation possibilities.

What’s unique with these designs?

The top views of the washbasins, with a geometric and controlled matrix, interact with the very thin edges evoking, in this way, the delicacy of the material while creating a new timeless three-dimensionality, well suited to any interior context.