Adriano Design's Lungolinea ping pong leather table.
What would be design's biggest goal if not reinvention?
Far beyond creating functional solutions for our needs, suggesting a new — and improved — version of something that already exists is, first of all, brave.
Since 1997, Adriano Design has combined high-end materials, the most advanced technology, and all-Italian craftsmanship to create a new level of innovation in any product.
The multidisciplinary team of brothers Davide and Gabriele works with such flexibility that it can give a fresh start to any area of design. As we've already shown you in another chat with them, these creatives from Turin deconstructed and reimagined indoor cycling with the Fuoripista bike, using premium, durable, and sustainable leather.
Keeping to the sportish area, but in a way you've never seen before, the designers presented us with the exclusive Lungolinea Ping Pong leather table, another creation resulting from their mantra:
“Every single thing can be forever re-designed in a different and better way.”
Lungolinea is not just eye-catching, unique, and innovative, this table is part of the long partnership between Adriano Designs and American architect and entrepreneur Gregg Brodarick, director of IMPATIA. Together, they created a series of high-class game tables under the brand name Calma e Gesso, a true aesthetic and tech revolution filled with details that they give in this interview. 👇
What initially sparked the desire to rework the classic ping pong table design with unexpected materials?
Ping pong is one of the most popular games in the world. A big table divided by a net in the middle, an object almost always designed to be folded over, moved, and hidden away after each use, being bulky and complex. These were all the ingredients that urged our desire to innovate the product formally, as well as its core significance, to reinvent a classic, an iconic object.
We wanted to transform the ping pong table into an object of desire, made for playing, amusing, astonishing, and furnishing. It's a table before anything else, but when needed, it transforms into a fabulous ping pong table.
How do you balance such distinct materials, the contrast between the translucent and the brutal, in reinventing a classic playing experience that so many are familiar with?
The crystal surface provides planarity and stiffness, ensuring an ever-perfect bouncing of the ball, while the surface itself remains unchanged in time. Thanks to steel nodes, the playing field may be leveled with high accuracy and the overall weight of the table ensures unique stability.
The table legs may be made of crystal, wood, or natural leather finish. The latter brings out best the theatrical presence of a crystal playing field held up by a small structure in natural leather.
Placing leather beside the glass softens its stiffness, coldness, immateriality, and transparency.
The two materials compensate for each other and balance one another, becoming symbiotic.
It's not just about breaking rules but making new and better ones for an evolution that cannot stop.
The path of innovators is in our design sesh.