Milan Design Week is particularly good for one thing: holistically imagined installations that when conceived well demonstrate the potential use of new products. Where these go wrong is in simply mounting loosely defined, marketing ploy, stylized backdrops for an endless onslaught of replicative social media moments.
Falling squarely in the first category are Danish electronics producer Bang & Olufsen (B&O) and Italian premium stone purveyor Antolini. The seemingly disparate yet complimentary brands have joined forces to mount a fully sensorial Milan Design Week installation playing up the opportune coherence of immaterial sound with emphatically material stone, presented in a recreated natural setting brought indoors: Antolini’s centrally located Duomo Stoneroom.
The fully sensorial showcase demonstrates both brand’s capacity, with new and refreshed product ranges cleverly paired together—more explicitly suggesting potential applications. B&O’s new Beosound Haven outdoor speaker anchors on and cuts through slabs of Antolini’s mat-finish Taj Mahal quartzite.
Surrounding these totemic combines are tastefully manicured zen gardens; a contextualized, if slightly fantastical evocation of where both device and material might live. At the center, there is a pool of water with a cascade of droplets falling from above.
“Design at Bang & Olufsen has always been about understanding the relationship between technology, materials, and the spaces people inhabit,” says Kresten Bjørn Krab-Bjerre, Senior Director of Design. “Through Beosound Haven – our forthcoming landscape speaker – we explore sound as an architectural language. It interacts with materials and forms atmosphere, creating a refined sense of place that is both subtle and powerful. It reflects our ambition to find new ways for sound to enrich the experience – not only as something you hear, but as something you truly feel.”
The collaboration extends to a limited run of the Beolab 18 speaker, produced using Antolini’s comprehensive range of natural stone products in matte finish: Amazonite, Retro Black Petrified Wood, Patagonia Original, Dalmata, and Cipollino Grey Wave, as well as Taj Mahal. “In collaboration with Bang & Olufsen, we have moved beyond traditional design to embrace the open air,” Carlo Alberto Antolini, owner of Antolini. “By blending the raw elegance of natural stone with precision sound, we’ve created a bridge between nature and technology. These landscape speakers are not just objects, they are a dialogue between the elements, transforming gardens and terraces into living galleries.”
To learn more about the Beosound Haven by Bang & Olufsen in collaboration with Antolini, visit bang-olufsen.com.
Photography by Max Zambelli.
