If on the Internet tips abound when it comes to musical playlists, dress-codes, and menus, there is no guide to organise a pool party dedicated to design, in other words: how to amaze your guests with a pool party full of auteur objects, some of which made design history. So we did it! Here’s a selection of garden furniture and colourful, ironic table complements and accessories.
Let’s start from an iconic piece: Blow designed by the DDL (De Pas, D’Urbino, Lomazzi) trio in 1967 for Zanotta. A dinghy turned into a colourful chair in electronically fused PVC. An armchair embodying the enthusiasm of those years of radical avant-gardes and utopias that generated Italian design. Out of production since 2012, if you succeed in finding it in its original cardboard packaging - containing the deflated chair, a pneumatic pump, and a kit for small reparations- your pool party will be a blast!
Same ironic mood for the Sam Son small armchair by Konstantin Grcic for Magis, which appears to have come out of a cartoon. Here too, colours (4 available) and soft and rounded shapes are the key. Hard plastic for the base and a more elastic polymer for the horseshoe-shaped upper section serving as armrest and seatback.
For a perfect party setting, scatter around the edge of the pool a whole lot of Rabbit Chairs by Stefano Giovannoni for Qeeboo, possibly alternating between the adult and the child version of the item and the variant that acts as lamp: the gentle rabbit will let you ride it with your arms on its ears, or to the opposite side, and it will light up your summer night.
And at the table? More colours with Kartell and the Dune tray in translucent polymer by Mario Bellini, which in its blue version seems to reflect the sea waves illuminating glasses and cups with three-dimensional chromatic and light effects. To be combined with the Jellies Family, still Kartell but by Patricia Urquiola, the collection of dishes, trays, glasses, cups, carafes, and coffee sets in a shiny colourful and transparent plastic material, which changes shape and reflections on contact with light.
No self-respecting pool party can finish without a collective dive, usually a bombing one, like the one Tania Cagnotto took at her last Italian Championships; they will be obviously less graceful, but be sure to provide your guests with pool towels. Those by Society Limonta with their colourful motifs of flowery meadows are very summery. You can choose between Tow, a soft towel in single-coloured griffé cotton, Flos a stylised flower with a gentle and romantic spirit, and Galles, a version of the classic Prince of Wales seen through a magnifying glass.
If details make the difference, the slippers are perfect: for her, the very colourful Miu Miu pool slides, made of rubber with a wavy profile and relief Art Deco flowers; for him, Ni-Jo, the sandals by Camper designed by Jasper Morrison and inspired by the Japanese Tatami.
