Teatro Franco Parenti, Fastweb Foyer

On the Milanese panorama of “design” locations, always tending towards amazement and innovation yet which often grow old too soon and are no longer fashionable, the Fastweb Foyer presents itself as a timeless environment, contemporary but already classical, new and as though it had always been that way. A bar, bookshop and internet café that is almost a domestic space, serving the Teatro Franco Parenti. Or rather: a sensitive container able, like a transforming actor, to mould itself to satisfy the needs of social interaction and intimacy, innovation and the habits of its “inhabitants”, even for just an evening. The name derives from the sponsor, who promoted its realisation, but it is also intended to recall the theatrical soul of the location.
Created in the spaces of an apartment on the mezzanine floor, at first glance the Fastweb Foyer presents itself as a very simple space, a long, narrow room with large windows. Here the many activities blend together and are organised with furnishings that recall various expressive styles: the bar corner, the restaurant zone, large bookcases full of new or rare books, sofas, plasma screens and internet terminals.
The materials used are traditional and humble, but when cleverly combined they create an atmosphere of warmth and richness: wood and MDF left natural (oak for the industrial floor; beech for the bar counter and part of the chairs; fir for the tables and internet terminals; MDF for the bookcases and doors), brass grid and rough iron for the bar counter, natural linen for the curtains, and the unmistakable Cementino on the walls.
The Fastweb Foyer is a place that is “unfinished”, in a certain sense, that does not want to be confined in the orderly completeness of a completed design but that, like a stage, lends itself to witnessing various events. And it also lends itself to change, thanks to time and the signs that this will leave on the materials and untreated surfaces.