The office building, designed by Lissoni Casal Ribeiro team, feature over 1,000 square metres of Nesite raised floor.
From there, you work on the land but you think only of the sea. We are talking about the office complex part of the Sanlorenzo Headquarters in Ameglia which, with the nearby La Spezia site, make up two of the four production sites of Sanlorenzo, one of the world’s leading monobrand manufacturers of yachts and superyachts. Sanlorenzo’s history in shipbuilding spans more than 60 years, starting from 1958, the year it was founded, and the company wanted to celebrate this anniversary by entrusting Piero Lissoni with the art direction of the brand and the restyling of both sites in 2018.
Immersed in the greenery of the Montemarcello-Magra natural park and overlooking the river of the same name, the first volume completed by the Lissoni Casal Ribeiro team in the master plan, still in the completion phase, stands in Ameglia: it is the office building that houses the workspaces of the design, marketing and sales divisions, as well as a material storage area, adjacent to the industrial buildings.
The blue sheet metal of the warehouses and their industrial language is transformed in the new building into a strongly geometric glass envelope that continues the essential tone. The façades consist of a pattern of fixed and movable panels in different widths and heights and in two finishes, including clear glass and a special screened glass made especially for this project. The slender window and doorframes thus create an orderly, uniform metal grid – where no openable parts are recognisable – interrupted only by the black frame of the entrance, which picks up on the roof, jutting out from the perimeter of the building.
Inside, the layout is precise and essential, offering an interpretation of the open space concept, with common areas in direct continuity with the individual work islands. The private offices are separated from it by large completely transparent glass curtains defined at the top and bottom by slender anthracite profiles. The desks, fixed and mobile furniture and ceilings are white; the adjustable seats and window frames, on the other hand, are black, and the combination of the two creates a pure, suspended space flooded with natural light, devoid of any sign of facilities.
The systems have been deliberately concealed in false ceiling and raised floor made by Nesite, which supplied more than 1,000 square metres of panels with calcium sulphate core and bleached oak finish. Thanks to the special ecological oil varnish that performs to the maximum naturalness of genuine wood, the floor contrasts pleasantly with the black and white aesthetic language of the rooms and guarantees maximum flexibility: the panels are 60×60 cm in size, 34 mm thick, hemmed by 2 strips of 30×4 mm laths and can be easily removed to allow for the necessary inspections. The materials chosen guarantee maximum performance in terms of walking comfort, load-bearing capacity and fire resistance, indispensable parameters in a high-traffic context such as an office. Nesite solutions are made according to criteria of environmental sustainability, with exclusively recycled or recyclable materials, and meet the sustainable philosophy of the project signed by Lissoni Casal Ribeiro, whose overall masterplan, still to be completed, is powered by over 8,000 square metres of solar panels with the result of a self-consumption and a certified production process, fully respecting the consumption of resources and the planet.
Images credits: Thomas Pagani
