A new story never begins from zero – its roots always stretch far back and it starts to take shape even before the story looks like a story. This story. In 1984, Flavia Ciatti presented CIATTI A TAVOLA for the first time at the Milan Furniture Fair. Impeccable and self-assured in a black and white Moschino tailleur, she amazed the world with a collection of accessory furnishings for the kitchen in polished steel and black laminate, several lengths ahead of what was to become a style – the industrial style inside the home – the male look in the kitchen comprised of black aprons and polished, ascetic worktops. Pure functionality and absolute practicality. And stylistic. In 1984, Bruno Rainaldi was managing a furniture shop in Milan which was the most extreme example of the industrial idiom. He was yet unaware of his future as a designer and even less so of being the winner of the Golden Compass award in 2004. Their stories touched, the one independent of the other. Flavia, the champion of simplicity in shape, Bruno fascinated by the many ways of expression beyond the commonplace. While Flavia Ciatti and the products designed by Gianni Pareschi, De Pas D’Urbino Lomazzi, Bruno Pozzi, Marco Duina, Christophe Pillet, Pino Pasquali, Lucci & Orlandini, Giancarlo Vegni that she selected for CIATTI A TAVOLA contributed to making the extraordinary capacity that Italian design has for research into form and concept better known, Bruno Rainaldi as a consultant to the furniture industry was beginning his own personal pathway through aesthetics and planning. Bruno suggested the concept of a new company to Flavia. FACEBOX.

Mirrors. Flavia responded offering him the artistic directorship of CIATTI A TAVOLA. And this is where this story begins. With the birth of PTOLOMEO. As sudden as an intuition. Its success was staggering, photographed like a diva everywhere at home and abroad. New additions to the PTOLOMEO family appeared: X2, X4, SHORT and success was renewed.

Lapo Ciatti has come into the company. After patient years of watching his mother’s entrepreneurial know-how he finished his design studies and, full of youthful energy, joined the group taking to it like a fish to water. One more head, a thousand new ideas – and comparisons – opinions. Opinion Ciatti is the story of a series of stories. Stories which are sometimes parallel sometimes divergent but always aware of and coherent with the definition of the aim. Intensive design.