Naturally Collection by Alexandra Goncalves

The leaves symbolize fragility, the stalks delicacy, and the plants structure: their elegance and their natural balance.

That's what we find in the Portuguese young designer Alexandra Goncalves' “Naturally Collection”. Born in Lisbon and a graduate of Interior Design from Madrid's “Istituto Europeo di Design” in 2009,  Alexandra has been working as an independent designer since 2011 in Berlin.

In June 2012 she launched in Zurich's “Krönen Gallery” her first collection: “Naturally”, a series of objects and furniture inspired by nature. The collection is set up by five pieces: a cabinet, a drawer, a center table, a lamp and a pouf.

The furnishing's shapes take their figures from plastic and filar structures present in nature, recreated by a delicate black structure of stainless steel. She combines it with a thin white skin, wood and a white lacquered metal sheet. All her choices referring to a common garden plant, Lunaria, which “in the end of life forms seed pods then flake away revealing silver disks.”

Alexandra aims to promulgate and depict the essential beauty of nature. The one that remains in its structure details even after that the bright colours have faded away. And she succeeds magnificently.

Her oeuvres, like the cabinet or the drawer, disclose a sturdy and solid body which all the while stand on a weak and thin structure. Giving life a kind of a paradox.

The lamp, on the other hand, incarnates a out-and-out plant. It twists and turns above the wall sinuously and gracefully ending in a stylized and blooming bud.

The beauty and the completeness of “Naturally” is not inferable just from the ability of the design process, but also from Goncalves' own emotional approach: “open to other interpretations and sensations that came up with object's interaction.”

Bianca De Ritis