Heading outdoors with Naoto Fukasawa

The new Ayana outdoor collection by Japanese designer Naoto Fukasawa for B&B Italia has arrived in time for summer, its simple timber detailing and soft stone surfaces underpinning the designer's love for the understated and getting back to nature.

Like all new designs launched since April this year, the Ayana outdoor collection by Japanese designer Naoto Fukasawa was released quietly without all the buzz of the annual Milan Furniture Fair behind it. For the design industry and specifically furniture manufacturers in Italy where the pandemic has been so severe, every design addition is another step towards recovery.

Described as "a new chapter in the story that connects B&B Italia to Naoto Fukasawa", the Ayana collection performs a cross-cultural balance between the south-east Asian tradition of working with wood and the form of the gymnastic Swedish wall bar, elegantly transforming the seat's load-bearing element via a series of careful intersections that are held together with concealed timber pins. 

"My feeling for outdoor furniture is it should come back to nature. That's the big idea."

Naoto Fukasawa

Beauty in simplicity is found in the Ayana outdoor colllection by Naoto Fukasawa for B&B Italia. Photo © Tommaso Sartori.

Beauty in simplicity is found in the Ayana outdoor colllection by Naoto Fukasawa for B&B Italia. Photo © Tommaso Sartori.

The Ayana three-seat sofa with waterproof fabric, and the coffee table with Serpentine stone top. Photo © Tommaso Sartori.

The Ayana three-seat sofa with waterproof fabric, and the coffee table with Serpentine stone top. Photo © Tommaso Sartori.

The Ayana diining table and chairs highlight a very simple approach to timber detailing. Photo © Tommaso Sartori.

The Ayana diining table and chairs highlight a very simple approach to timber detailing. Photo © Tommaso Sartori.

A designer who sees beauty in the simple things, designs like the clever paperclip that quietly works to make life hum, Fukasawa’s approach is grounded in both comfort and common sense. There is a kind of anti-excess stance that underpins the Fukasawa oeuvre, its mission explored with friend and fellow designer Jasper Morrison in the exhibition and subsequent book 'Super Normal: Sensations of the Ordinary' in 2006. When the show opened in Tokyo and Milan with more than 200 objects, many well known, the curators posed questions about why so many designs fail to pass the everyday test, if beauty is just about looks or if there could be more to it than meets the eye, and why some objects get better with time. 

Like all of Naoto Fukasawa's designs, the Ayana collection is beautifully pared back to the essential elements using solid materials left raw to accentuate their natural characteristics. 

Ayana is made of natural teak and stone and upholstered in waterproof fabrics. The sofa, armchair, dining chair and a series of tables are carefully crafted and assembled using traditional carpentry techniques, and the tables are made using serpentine, a stone found in the Italian Alps. Of importance to Fukasawa was the respect the range has for the environment. The teak sourced is FSC certified by the Forest Stewardship Council, and all the materials that make up the various furniture elements can be separated and recycled.

B&B Italia and the Ayana collection are available exclusively in South East Asia from Space – Asia and Space – Australia.


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