Tom Dixon and Yos Shiran - Press Preview Milan 2016

Good morning everybody, would you like to come and take a seat?

My name is Jacob Paris and I'm very pleased to welcome you to the restaurant by Caesarstone and Tom Dixon. Before you start, as you can see there's breakfast served from the kitchen, so whoever hasn't had the chance to sample all four kitchens, you'll have time after the presentation. Francesca from our rescue dell'arte is around, so she can help with all the different delicatessen that is prepared for us today. This restaurant will be operated as a fully operated restaurant throughout the next three days, so people are going to be able to enjoy lunch and dinner throughout the day. So that's something that is not just available for you guys. I would like to welcome Yos Shiran, CEO of Caesarstone, to come and open the stage.

Okay, I got to click on okay. Hi, I'm so... Clive, where are you? Help me out here. I've got some pictures for you. How do I do it, Clive? Okay, good. So this year, well, obviously working with Caesarstone, but our theme has been materiality. And the reason for this, well, I'll tell you a little story. Maybe one... we're gonna... you click because this isn't working. Okay, so this is a picture of me with rap superstar Usher. So Usher is taking a selfie of himself and me together. And I've been doing a little bit of Instagram like all of you, and I thought this was going to be a fantastic picture on Instagram and it was going to get loads of likes. And I was very proud to be with Usher, he's got 45 million Facebook followers, right? But we got 600 likes. Next picture, yeah. So that's my Instagram story. Next picture, please. Okay, so then we posted a picture of a block of wood, and this block of wood got 2,600 likes, which shows that the design community is a much more serious audience and not at all celebrity-obsessed, right? And what they were interested in is what I'm interested in, which is materials and how you make things, right? So the block of wood is superior to Usher in our world, and that's why we called this season and we wanted to make a theme about materiality. So all the partners, all of the objects that you see around here, all of the food cooked by the amazing chefs, is to do with the raw materials of our trade. We've always used big slabs of product, in this case, in a pestle and mortar, stone, and in this case, huge chunks of glass to make our things. And we want things to be long-lasting. We want things also to be usable not only in the home but in professional circumstances as well. So we spend a lot of time getting the best quality stuff that we can, and we've surrounded ourselves with objects and materials and partners that also have this overlap between the professional world and the domestic world. There's some new things that we've produced this year based also on things that we've been thinking about for a long time. So these stools made from offcuts of wood. Next, keep going. And well, back one. And even with the Caesarstone, we find ourselves with a surface material made from quartz which we use in a very different way, more sculptural way, to really bring out the qualities of the material. So if you can talk a bit about the idea of a restaurant, here we have a restaurant in London and I've taken to being the sous chef in the restaurant, which gives me a very different perspective on design from a lot of other designers because suddenly you're at the bottom of the pile again. I'm used to being the boss, right? But in the restaurant, I'm very much the bottom of the pile and I have to work in the team, I have to use equipment, and you can be a much better designer of restaurants if you've worked in a kitchen. So what you see in a kitchen is really the battering that the equipment gets, and really one of the most important things is the surfaces. So we decided in Milan to do not a show of products but to put together this restaurant because it's the optimum landscape for showing people how things function. So with the Caesarstone, we started in Toronto with the first kitchen, which is called Ice, which is the one that you come to at the beginning. And the idea here really was to demonstrate a kitchen not just as a series of pieces of equipment. And I think the traditional kitchen is really very much hugging the wall, really to do with square cabinets, but to show them as the important sculptural elements that they can be. And so what we're doing here is to create four kitchens, and we've partnered also not just with Caesarstone but also with Electrolux because they share that intersection between the professional world and the domestic world. So they've got a range called Grand Cuisine which is what we're using here, which is a series of equipment with professional quality, latest equipment for chefs where they do things like blast chilling, which we're going to demonstrate in these four kitchens over the week. And they specialize in professional equipment and domestic equipment which makes them the optimum partner for us here. Paolo is going to be cooking, Paolo, thank you, and he's going to be demonstrating not just the amazing new techniques of blast cooking but also vacuum preserving the food as well and steaming and all the ways that the professional chefs make the amazing things they do but translated into a domestic context. So that's the food and the collaboration with Grand Cuisine, and you can see again the similarity of materials that people like Grand Cuisine use and we use, like the cast iron, which is indestructible. Next. The restaurant, I think all of you have sat in endless formal dinners in Milan, right? Sometimes sitting next to people that you didn't want to sit next to, sometimes sitting next to great people that maybe you run out of conversation. So this is a restaurant where all of this is broken up and deconstructed. The idea really is that you start off and you move in between courses. Every course you move to a different restaurant room. So it's a deconstructed restaurant where four courses are served in four different ways as you move around the room. The Air Kitchen, if you show that, the next picture, the Air Kitchen is really at the beginning where you're going to be seeing all the methods of incorporating air into food or sucking air out of food, the vacuum packing and so on. And it's really a very airy... sorry, I'm pointing the wrong one. This is the Air Kitchen, right? So you can see even the Caesarstone is used in a much more airy way, and our lights also, the lights which are pierced and filtering the light, so air is incorporated into the lighting, into the surfaces, and into the food by the equipment. So that's the Air Kitchen. The Earth Kitchen, which is over there, is an exercise in really talking about the earthly nature of cooking. And here you have a kitchen where we're actually growing things in this aqueduct which sits above the kitchen, very much inspired by the arches that you see in the basilica around you. And there's going to be a series of very earthy root vegetables being cooked there. And you could remember all this food which is around us for eating, it's not for display, okay? As you get to the Ice Kitchen, it's really about the watery nature of cooking, which is the boiling, the steaming, and the ice. And so there'll be a series of icy treats for you today. And Fire, of course, that element which everybody uses in the kitchen to char things, to flame grill things. And it's this kitchen over here where we've incorporated it not only with these much darker colors of the Caesarstone but the copper that we've used a lot in our lamps. So that's the four kitchens, and they'll be operating as a restaurant all through the week. Next picture. And here you see Francesca, who was mentioned a bit earlier, from Arabesque dell'Arte, who's done the conceptual development of the food. And there's very few pictures of her, I had to grab this one by candlelight last night of her because no pictures of her exist, she's a very secret individual. Next. So you'll see the cooking methods again here. The chicken, a traditional Italian recipe where you squash the chicken in a hot brick. Some reason... keep going. The root vegetables from the other kitchen, a weird type of marshmallow type thing from Italy which incorporates air from the Air Kitchen, and the icy treats from the Ice Kitchen. Next. So being in the kitchen has inspired us also to make lots of artifacts, and we've moved more recently not just into furniture and lighting but into tech accessories. And a lot of these accessories are defined really by the adventures we've had in catering for people. So the teapots we make and the trays that we make. And also it's been kind of interesting being a designer that doesn't just do products but also does interior design. This is the latest cocktail bar that we've designed, which is a secret speakeasy in Atlanta in Georgia. And again you can see obviously the lights from last year, the melt lamps that have been quite popular. But what it's done is to allow us to get much closer to drinking culture as well as eating culture. So you see here the interior of a space, and it allows us not only to think about how you serve food and how you illuminate spaces but also odd things like the acoustics of a space or the smells of the space. So when we design, we're not just designing for making the object itself, we're also designing to really think about the impact on the space and how you operate these spaces as well. So the cocktail culture has allowed us also to collaborate with Johnnie Walker. So you're going to have a load of whiskey, I know it's a bit early for whiskey this morning, but I think the bar is operational with the Johnnie Walker Blue Label and will be served all through the day and night as we go through the week. So enjoy the whiskey and the cocktail culture. It's allowed us also to again design more accessories and more drinking culture objects this year, and you'll see lots more of these things coming through from the product development teams that we've got. So furniture, lighting, drinking objects, food preparation, and more collaborations with other brands. These are other spaces we designed this year. Keep going, Clive. And like I say, even getting into other categories like scents as well. So you can see the elements theme not just for Milan but also in the smells that we're creating this year. Yeah, more smells and more finishes. So a few more of the objects that we're presenting which are new. So the Flask Lamp here, and you can see this very sharp move away from the metallics we've been using, the coppers and gold, to this much more iridescent metallic finish that you'll be seeing a lot more of coming up in the Flask Lamp. Yup, a coffee set for all the people that didn't like the tea, they can drink coffee with us as well. Keep going. And here are the new lamps which are coming through. This lamp, Curve, is really again another exercise in precision metalwork, really piercing very small holes, almost invisible holes in the structure to allow the light to be filtered through. And you can see here quite complex metalwork coming through with a central chandelier that you've seen behind you here. So that's the new lamp called Curve. And the family of copper lamps that we've been... we only had one quite lonely spherical ball lamp in copper and it's been an amazing object for us for a long time. So we decided to squeeze it and squash it this year. So we pulled it a bit larger and we flattened it as well. You're going too fast, Clive. Okay, fine, we'll just finish on this flight. Okay, so here you see a hairy chair. Thanks, Helene, who put the whole show together. Helene wanted to make a hairy chair, so we allowed her to put a load of fur on the wingback chair, which is really an iconic piece. And of course the Melt Lamp. So Melt Lamps were last year's big hit, and we've done an incredible amount of work with them. It was a collaboration with Front, the Swedish girls, where we used one of their molds and created a lamp together which has been really quite successful. So we thought we'd add a few objects to the line, and you'll see here a standing lamp and a table lamp of the same set. And in the backdrop what you see is another collaboration also with the carpet company, Ege. We've been working with them last year, and the textiles all around and on the upholstery is also from Kvadrat. And there's also some leather in the back there from Bill Amberg. Bill's over there, yeah. So you can see that it's all tied together. There's a quite complicated series of themes: one, materiality, which is what we always work on and all our partners are obsessed with as well, material being very important for the quality of things and the durability of things and really being the departure point for any designer's ambitions. The restaurant, which is really about doing a different way of presenting things in Milan, where instead of showing prototypes on a podium, we're inviting you to come and actually sit on the furniture, test the furniture, slow down a bit in the madness that is Milan. And the elements, which is really about a different way of creating a restaurant and dividing this collection of kitchens into four different cooking methods, which then fit very neatly in this cruciform church here which has four different spaces which are quite distinct. So please, in conclusion, eat the food that's here because it's not for display, it's for enjoyment. Please come back and please slow down and enjoy not just the Rotunda and the collections and the partnerships but also the beautiful lawn outside. And I wish you all a very happy and successful Milan. Okay.

Any questions? Two things actually: on the wall of images from here later this evening, they're going to be on the links on this fruit box, fruit pack, the link for the press site. Any questions? Embarrassing, no questions? Okay, where you want to ask that?

When's the time due to rediscover where your copper came from and stuff? What has really triggered this reconnection with your materials and refocus on what are you discovering from these journeys that you're taking?

Okay, you saw on Instagram a visit to Chile, to the copper mines of Chile. What started my reconnection with the materials? It's never gone away, to be honest. You know, I think like I said before, every designer has got to be obsessed with the raw material of their trade. I think the contemporary designer that is very computer-based right now is getting disconnected from the materials of the trade. It's too easy on SolidWorks or 3D Max to just change the material of an object with a button, right? So you can have a glass chair, you can have a textile shape, and have a wood chair just by clicking a button. But I started designing really through a love of raw materials, and in fact my first encounter was doing pottery at school. So I think that thing of actually manipulating something and transforming a piece of earth into a desirable object is really what made me a designer, and I've never lost that passion for the stuff that things are made from. And I think, you know, the more you talk to designers, the more that's a motivating factor, and it really is a departure point. Okay, that was it. And any more questions? Okay, I'm going to be here because you're all embarrassed to ask me questions, so you can ask me questions personally. So thank you, okay.