52 DAVIDE GROPPI MASTER OF LIGHT
In the acclaimed designer’s Piacenza palace, the light defines the decor, telling a wondrous tale. Groppi’s favourite glow comes from table lamps «because it’s the light of meetings, conversations, silences, and glances»
Some stories arise from the poetics of a place, or from a gesture or exchange within the emotional confines of a family, but then they travel all over the world taking with them a unique, distinctive vocabulary of their own. That’s the story of Davide Groppi, for example, who works in a tiny workshop in the heart of Piacenza. He began his dialogue with light in the 1980s, not knowing exactly why he was doing it other than that his father had taught him to make things: «A pinball machine, a telegraph.... and then a lamp». Since then Groppi has been designing (and producing) stories about light, and he has never left Piacenza thanks to his workshop of doing and thinking (and playing) that has grown over time, has been made stronger by winning two Compasso d’Oro awards, and now, this year, is joining the holding company Italian Design Brands, a centre of excellence in lighting design: «a new travelling companion with which to consolidate, together, a broader vision of the future. But a future that is still «Made in Piacenza» and will remain so». For the past nine years Groppi has been living within the Renaissance walls of Piacenza’s historic centre in a 17th century palace surrounded by a spontaneous garden. «A house that’s neither big nor small. To be inhabited by circulating between the kitchen, the living room, and the greenery: the traditional way of living here in Emilia». The guiding principle for the spaces of his house is light, which Groppi organises into a narration consisting of four words: simplicity, lightness, emotion, invention. He says of his Sampeii range «it’s a blade of grass that oscillates and flexes under the weight of your gaze when you look at it; ultimately, it’s a fishing rod. For me, light has always been a kind of alphabet with which to tell stories. All my projects are anagrams: combinations of letters. I never