Beyond sleep: Flou's pursuit of timeless interiors

The mellifluous Italian word Flou, in English, translates roughly to ‘soft focus’. It’s an apt sentiment for the evergreen company of the same name: founded by Rosario Messina in 1978 with the advent of its trendsetting Nathalie bed – the first modern, padded textile bed created ‘ready for sleep’, with removable covers – dreamed up by that Milanese wizard of industrial design, Vico Magistretti.

To say that Nathalie revolutionised the nature of slumber is no understatement – not for nothing did it receive the XXVI ADI Compasso d’Oro for the product’s career; the prize jury declaring it an 'indisputable protagonist of Italian Design Culture' – but the intervening decades have only seen Flou’s star rise, and its domestic purview widen. And while beds may remain the brand’s criterion, its new collection, previewed at this year’s Salone del Mobile, comprises a cultivated series of products for across the home.

The pieces – in typical Flou fashion – revolve around the tenets of aesthetic balance, functionality and comfort; artfully created with a raft of unique and intuitive material choices, creating a sense of well-being and lived-in comfort. Sleep does, of course, feature. The new Elia bed, says the brand playfully, is the 'protagonist of the master bedroom'. Sculptural and robust (the chunky headboard and base a melange of tactile fabrics and coffee-stained ash or ebony), it was designed by Matteo Nunziati in thrall to Antonio Sant’Elia, 'the futurist architect who was able to fuse the large volumes of classical monumentality with the dynamism of futuristic poetics'.

Similarly nuanced in its melding of undulating geometrics and soporific appeal is Diletto; designer Pinuccio Borgonovo’s ingenious double-daybed and sofa. It’s fluid stuff: the sinuously folding backrest divided into two movable parts, and a mechanism allowing for differing depths of seating. Raise both backrests and the main seat becomes a bed; pulling out the base of a second version of the chair creates a lower bed that can also be raised in line with the first. In a world where the litany of sofa-beds prescribes to being ‘in’ or ‘out’, it's a canny design. Both are complemented by Notturno Wall: a custom-made, wall-affixed boiserie that can be combined with any bed in the collection and appears, in effect, as a simultaneously minimalist and gargantuan headboard up to 259cm high.

Nocturnal arrangements complete, things get more prepossessing still. Designed by Carlo Colombo and named after the Japanese for ‘city’, Toshi comprises a ‘sleeping group’ of flared cylindrical and pill-shaped drawer units; the lacquered frames rendered in dark woods or leather, beautifully offset with swirling marble tabletops and subtle, recessed metal rings around the drawers, in polished gold, black nickel or chrome finishes. 'Toshi evokes an idea of a vertical metropolis, a skyline of pure forms that alternate and develop in height,' explains Colombo – his pieces incorporating the space, solids and voids, and matte and polished textures, of a modern cityscape.

More eye-popping is the sculptural Machard table by Studio Contromano. The hourglass-shaped base is densely woven with fine ropes in a manner that causes the hefty table-top (in multi-faceted glass, marble or wood) to float improbably above; a design that appears timelessly surreal for indoor use, and otherworldly outside.

Finally, the 2025 collection includes two sets of designs under Flou’s Natevo brand imprint, combining rarefied aesthetics with the functionality of light. First is Chiaro di Luna; an extended riff on the 2023 bedside table, whose filigree-style wire frameworks are developed across an Art-Deco-inflected inventory of writing desk, compact occasional tables, bench and consoles with poufs. Of all the new launches, they might be the most lucent – several iterations across the set made literally incandescent with lustrous yellow LEDS – while also affording the ‘less noble’ material of metal a chic, unusual finish.

It's a quintessential vision from the mind of designer Ilenia Viscardi, who also conceived the Bamboo collection of mirrors, incorporating gently diffused LED lighting directable around a space via the hinged metal frame. 'Like a bamboo forest,' says Viscardi, 'these mirrors develop vertically, playing with the light and letting it filter gently just like the sun through the branches'.

Taken as one, the new collection works are a seamless expression of contemporary living; inflected with classical, modernist, Art Deco and midcentury flourishes, but remaining singular – and definitively – Flou.

© Architonic