the pastel tablecloth
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Spring has arrived and the living room is tinged with colourful fruits and vegetables like flowers. The light changes and becomes brighter. In the house the windows are open again and the balcony is a sunny spot to rest. I have a light-coloured tablecloth in my drawers that I often use, which smells of April and May. While I cook, it amuses me to notice how each colour has its place among its squares. For years now, in this small kitchen it has announced the arrival of the warmer season.
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What is home can usually be defined as such by its being cosy, familiar and everyday. It often happens, therefore, that we are bound to objects that have fallen into our hands by chance, but which have grown recognisable to our eyes, so much so that they become childhood memories or define what will later be home for us.
What better companion than the tablecloth, which transforms as the day goes by, which welcomes everyday lunches, on which one rests while cooking or having breakfast or tea. Usually, therefore, it will be the most familiar of all. Among tablecloths for special occasions, it will be the day-to-day one, always there to warm the house.
The Pastel tablecloth brings with it precisely this familiarity, images and colours woven into the collective memory. -
Its linen and cotton cloth is a warm, sandy white on which thiner and then wider stripes run to form a pastel-coloured tartan. But its identity is not only resolved in the domestic sphere, as its inspiration comes from another heritage and it is here that the linearity of this tablecloth's narrative blows up in favour of greater complexity. Pastel's domestic tartan has as its reference in Gio Ponti's 1930 work for the Società Ceramica Richard-Ginori. It is a set of porcelain dyed in the rigorous pattern of a tartan: the same pattern that recalls a home kitchen in those years represented a point of breakthrough and innovation.It will be this combination that makes Pastel, a convivial, jovial, fresh and timeless tablecloth, one more reason to look forward to the fragrant breeze of spring.
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"pastel" napkin
Images courtesy of Giulia Coluccello.