Context: Powered by Elle Decor, Creative Direction by Nascent Design
Location: Brera, Milan
Concept, Scenography, and Digital Content: (AB)NORMAL
Project Team: Camilla Morandi, Giulia Cova, Marija Ivljanin
Set inside a Milanese palazzo in the Brera district, the launch of the Flaer brand embraces the space's original identity through stunning Venetian terrazzo floors, frescoed ceilings, and period chandeliers. Our design intervention works by substitution: rather than altering or hiding the existing architecture, we transform what is seen beyond its windows.
The project reflects on the condition of the contemporary traveler, often divided between distant locations and shifting time zones. The scenography evokes that sense of suspension and memory experienced upon returning from a journey, when the images of what was just lived overlap with present reality.
Digital Belvederes & Perceptual Distortion
The spatial operation replaces the apartment’s actual views—overlooking Brera’s historic gardens—with digital belvederes. Expansive LED surfaces project each room toward distant geographies, creating a simultaneity of places and moments that plays with the idea of travel as an experience of suggestion. A system of semi-transparent curtains guides visitors along the path, mediating what to hide, what to show, and what to merely hint at.
The corridor acts as the axis of this perceptual distortion: a limbo where a sequence of luminous digital windows suggests further possible glimpses of the outside. It is the space connecting not just the rooms, but their atmospheres, turning a simple passage into a journey through varying landscapes and emotions.
Domestic Observatories
In the rooms dedicated to the Flaer collection, the furniture is positioned in front of these wide digital openings. Resting on slightly elevated, reflective platforms, they form intimate lounges—small domestic observatories from which to contemplate the outside world, or more likely, the internal landscapes of personal memory. It is the contemporary experience of being transported elsewhere simply by looking out.
The projected landscapes are deliberately abstract, leaving each visitor the space to complete these visions with their own memories. The Flaer objects remain the focal points: illuminated, tangible, and perfectly defined—anchors in a setting that fluctuates between the present and the remembered.
A Privileged Vantage Point
Travel settles in fragments: a night city, dawn light in the desert, the color of the sea at sunset. These instants persist within us as private landscapes. Architecture provides the vantage point—a sofa, a room, a threshold from which to look out. The design itself becomes the instrument for observing the horizon, presenting Flaer as a collection of privileged stations: furnishings that are not merely functional objects, but devices for contemplating the world.
Guided by audioscapes, video sequences, and tactile material elements, visitors move through varying locations and time zones. Places and moments coexist, crafting a path that is simultaneously familiar and alienating, everyday and dreamlike—much like flipping through old travel photographs, finding oneself simultaneously here and there.
