Casa Italia unveils new furniture lines

COURTESY PHOTO Furniture by the Ronald Schmitt Company. Casa Italia is introducing two new furniture lines, from Porada and the Ronald Schmitt Company. The Casa Italia showroom is at Suite 250 at the International Design Center, 10800 Corkscrew Road, Estero. Casa Italia's Web site is casaitaliaonline.com.

Porada Luigi Allievi, who first began producing chairs in 1948, established Porada in 1968. He expanded his business into other fields, assisted by his sons.

Quality and experience in working with wood rapidly gave the company a well-defined identity that is now expressed by elegant products, designed to contribute a touch of class to homes.

The firm's expansion started with the partnerships with such designers as the architects Alberio and Cerbaro and with Martino Perego, leading to the Linea 91 and the Hoppo collections.

Keeping faith with the use of solid wood, the firm embarked on production that now also involves other materials: steel, glass and plastics. This soon generated new experiments that started with the partnership with Tarcisio Colzani, whose more important pieces include the successful Cuccagna system of equipped columns for every room in the house and elsewhere.

In response to its desire to generate evolved collections and translate the company's own tenets into expressions of style, Porada started creating highly functional pieces with a refined design, involving a series of designers including Marconato & Zappa, Studio Opera, Studio 28, Giovanna Azzarello, Mandelli & Selva and Giuseppe Viganò.

Ronald Schmitt

The people from Baden-Wurttemberg are known for many things in particular for their ability to fiddle and puzzle, invent patentables and collect patents. What the dowel producer Artur Fischer, for instance, succeeded in doing with plastic, was done by Ronald Schmitt with glass. Both of them conquered an international market with crafty, cunning puzzling.

Ingenuity and inventiveness, combined with Swabian entrepreneurial spirit, are the main features of Ronald Schmitt Tische GmbH.

In less than half a century, a one-man business has become a medium-sized company with a staff of 140 people.

Mr. Schmitt's story of success started in Stuttgart after World War II. He stopped working as a commercial employee to try his luck in a small backyard workshop. First he started laying mosaic coffee tables. The workshop, just 40 square meters, was everything at that time workshop, office, and storeroom. The first financial investment of 3,000 deutschmarks was spent for a small platform truck. With this truck, the marketing talent scored the furniture shops in Southern Germany, thus creating a demand for his tables.

For four years, Mr. Schmitt manufactured and sold his furniture this way, until he presented several tables with crystal glass tops at the Frankfurt Furniture Fair in 1962. Orders flooded in and a year later, the company was able to celebrate the first turnover exceeding a million.

Mr. Schmitt has amazed his customers with functional, beautiful tables. Intelligent systems enlarge, rise and move tabletops, using hidden mechanics. More than 20 international patents have been invented by this "think tank.''

Occasional tables, dining tables, coat stands, cabinets, chairs, and lightings, melded from glass, metal, wood and stone, complete the range of products offered by the company.