4 - Dispatch From Italian Design

Dateline Torino:

Modern Italian design is rightfully renowned.  It tosses out convention, stodgy old styles - but often the basic purpose of the object as well.  If it looks “bella!” it must be “fantastico!”  Nothing on the road is sexier than Ferrari, Lamborghini or Maserati - but they are more useful to send a mechanic’s kid to college, than to drive him there.

Our very luxurious Torino hotel has a lighting system of the most hi-tech remote control buttons that cannot be felt as on/off - and when pushed, delay for a second before letting you know if they did anything, nothing or the wrong thing.  Enter the room and one light pops on to allow the room card-key to be inserted into a slot - at which time every bulb in the place is lit - bath, bed, hall, closet, reading, desk, etc.  

Each individual light must then be visited to extinguish, or over to the far wall (and kicking the protruding leg of the haute couture chair) and then try to guess which one of a panel of buttons turns off everything - or automatically powers open the drapes for a view of the restaurant - and visa versa.  

And the restaurant is not immune from  better design - a pepper grinder that needs to be handed around and admired - all of us looking to find a way to get the gleaming tube to produce pepper.

The hotel's showers are also beautiful - a brochure photo from every angle.  But these descendants of the Romans (that invented running water and built aqueducts that still transport it flawlessly for miles) - have so precisely leveled the showers that they drain equally into, as well as out of.  And the exquisitely sleek multi-spray apparatus is beyond control, squirts hard where it shouldn't and continues to rain when turned off - requiring drying to be done on the flooded, deathly slippery - but gorgeously polished marble floor.  Wading over to the sink we find a chic towel rack - at a most unaccommodating level for nude users. Unless it is suppose to dry the nether regions while one shaves, can only be there for looks.

All this nuovo Italian design, is truly a feast for the eyes (except for those in the restaurant) but a pain for this practical old Scot’s toes and tush.  So ... its “buona notte” (good night) - if I can turn off the lights.

-  Stubbed Stew

Stitched Logo in bike seat and now in my butt.

Cool but ... ?

Lookout below.

Ferrari Coffeemaker? 

Bowls that won't stack