Meet the Supplier: Fantini

1. Could you tell us about how the company started?

Fantini is a typical example of an Italian design factory, a family business established in 1947 by brothers Giovanni and Ersilio Fantini, a place with immense creative intensity that manages to combine great hand-crafting skill with industrial technology and processes.

Fantini is in Pella, on the shores of Lake Orta, a small lake set among the mountains of Piedmont: it’s a sort of genius loci, an ideal location where the constant presence of water and the serene atmosphere it creates are the premises for work and creativity. Water, so constantly present in the everyday life of the company, is the underlying theme of its history that is based on a number of fundamental values: passion for work, ethics, professionalism and respect for people. Design has been part of the company’s genetic makeup since its very foundation, and the strength of its products lies in technological innovation combined with the creative contribution of talented designers.

2. What inspires your designs?

Design is part of the company’s DNA and of the patrimony of its long productive experience: but the result of the task is always the team’s goal. It is a way of working that sees many actors on the scene, each with his own role, but without hierarchies. This puts the individual, their qualities, and their abilities at the heart of the process. From the designer to the technical staff, from the manager to the worker, each contributes in their own role to the final results of the product.

At Fantini, the design of the products is commissioned from some of the most important international designers who we believe are in tune with the company philosophy. The specific result is to have a whole range of formal and expressive languages that can even deliberately be very different from each other, but that are also joined by a thin common thread that we might call “contemporariness,” as well as by other more subtle formal features — lightness, elegance, a sort of gentleness — that make up the specific feature of Fantini products as compared with the faucets manufactured by other companies. And always with that specific identity that is known as the “Fantini style.”

Could you tell us a bit more about your manufacturing production process?

We can safely say that our products are authentic, made with great care, with an almost exaggerated attention to detail, and with an important element of craftsmanship. They are entirely made in Italy and this allows us to closely monitor the final quality of the product. Our aim is that of creating faucets that are like “jewels,” small masterpieces that connote the bathroom space in the same way that a piece of jewelry can characterize a dress and the person wearing it. These are products that respect people and the environment, which have upstream and distinct strategic choices, such as the fact that they are lead-free or that steel is used, something that is growing in importance for us.

Which emerging trends have you recently noticed?

We pay close attention to monitor the trends of the design around the world and, in general those ones coming from the end users. Energy saving and safety are primary themes. Our products are eco-friendly: low-lead content, and a vast range of them are made of stainless steel.  Energy-saving is key and determines interventions on the products on several fronts to safeguard the consumer as well as the environment: in terms of reduction in water consumption per minute; in the adoption of the most cutting-edge standards for lead-free faucets; in the choice to expand the number of stainless steel products.

From the point of view of the stylistic trends in current design, there is a request of finishes with increasingly sophisticated chromatic and haptic effects. This is the direction that our research and developement department is taking with the PVD finishes. PVD finishes provide metal products with a range of special chromatic effects: the unique colour Gunmetal – between burnished dark grey and blue – the warm bronzed Copper –a sort of rose-coloured brown and the sophisticated, placid and elegant “British Gold”. Our wide range perfectly fits in the most avant-garde and sophisticated interior projects.

Could you share a fun fact about Fantini?

“When the company started experimenting industrially with colour for I Balocchi – says Daniela Fantini, that became the Fantini icon. We got to the dyeing system through trial and error, trying to do things as best we could to make. Painted faucets weren’t being manufactured then, and I remember my father going to visit a company that made pots and pans. He went to see another company that painted Coca-Cola machines. He also had these flakes of colour that he would grind in the coffee grinder and then bake in the kitchen oven to see what would happen when they melted. But then we found the right way and I Balocchi became like “grandchildren” for my father, and Davide Mercatali and Paolo Pedrizzetti like his own children. Those were fun times, memorable ones”.