Gufram - Nerocactus coat stand

The subject of several, free and often ambiguous interpretations, Cactus is the icon of Italian design that has revolutionized the domestic landscape, by subverting the borders between indoor area and open space. Cactus comes as an ironic totem, and embodies the grit, the imagination and the humour of the design of the Seventies. Likely to draw upon itself everybody’s attention, this hall-tree redeems itself from functionalism at all costs, because it can perform its function, but also be used as a merry decorative element. You have freedom of interpretation. Cactus comes to life in 1972 thanks to the genius of Guido Drocco and Franco Mello, and from the start it questions the static and rigid world of interior design. Its first edition was a very deep emerald shade (sold out edition), and since then it is cyclically reinterpreted according to the colour and the style of the moment. In 2007 we had the white version (sold out edition); in 2010 it was the turn of red and black. In 2012, on occasion of the first piece’s fortieth anniversary, Cactus came in a new limited edition called Metacactus. In this variation the green lime colour fades into orange at the tips, as if they were toasted by the scorching sun of the desert. For Gufram’s comeback to France in 2015, the company introduces a new limited special edition of the legendary Cactus, named Lebluecactus (sold out edition). The hall tree designed by Drocco and Mello turns blue - the same shade as the French flag - a representative hue of all the myriad different nuances that populate the many latitudes of the “Hexagone”.

Drocco/Mello

Guido Drocco was born in San Benedetto Belbo, Cuneo, on 19 September 1942. He graduated in Architecture at the Politecnico di Torino. He works in architecture and industrial design and is active in Turin. Since 1996 he has been lecturer in Architectural Design at the Faculty of Architecture of the Polytechnic of Turin.

Gufram

Gufram is an Interior Design Italian brand globally known for pushing the limits of industrial design. With its Radical Design spirit and its nonconformist experimentation linked to aesthetic, technological and material research, Gufram has created seats and interior design icons that have entered collective imagination: playful, subversive and desecrating products with a POP soul, willingly designed as anti-design items. Gufram was born in Turin as an artisanal entity, where the craftsmen specialized in upholstery, cabinet making and furniture padding met the artistic and international avant-garde with the goal to give birth to a new way of understanding modern furniture. Since 1966 Gufram has been producing design icons that have become unique in form and value thanks to the cross-contamination between the industrial design approach, the artisanal creation and the imaginative flair typical of art. Gufram's unmistakable furniture items like the couch Bocca, the chaise lounge Pratone and the hall tree Cactus (just to name a few), also known as Domestic Sculptures able to interpret the contact point between both the artistic and the design worlds, are now displayed in the most beautiful houses and in the most renowned museums in the world.