Giusto Purini & Maurizio Mariani for Vivai Del Sud, Italy Sculptural Bamboo Chest, Circa 1975

Giusto Purini & Maurizio Mariani for Vivai del Sud, Italy Sculptural Bamboo Chest, circa 1975 A rare and highly sculptural bamboo chest by Giusto Purini and Maurizio Mariani for the Roman design firm Vivai del Sud, dating to around 1975. The bi-tiered, faceted carcass is articulated in bold trapezoidal volumes, each face meticulously veneered in split bamboo rods set in alternating chevron and lozenge formations. The dynamic relief and strong graphic patterning give the piece a pronounced architectural presence, typical of the most ambitious Vivai del Sud commissions of the 1970s. The body sits on a recessed plinth base, visually lightening the mass and emphasising the hovering, “floating” geometry. Three full-width drawers are concealed within the upper and lower register, opening to a plain light-wood interior. Giusto Puri Purini (b. Rome, 1944) trained as an architect and began his career as a set designer for Roberto Rossellini’s television productions before joining Vivai del Sud in the early 1970s. From 1972 to 1977 he served as project designer for the firm, developing a distinctive language of bold, geometric forms realised in bamboo, rattan and brass for luxury interiors and hotel projects. Maurizio Mariani was likewise active in Rome’s design milieu of the period and is closely associated with Vivai del Sud’s most sculptural bamboo pieces, including important dining tables, shelving and mirrors that combine rigorous geometry with highly worked natural materials. Their collaborative works for Vivai del Sud are now recognised as among the most sophisticated expressions of Italian “organic modern” design of the 1970s. Vivai del Sud itself was founded in Rome in 1950 by the Di Pierri brothers as a landscape and garden architecture firm. From around 1970 the company expanded into interior decoration and furniture, producing limited runs of high-end pieces for hotels, villas and winter gardens in Italy and abroad. Its work, often mixing Baroque and classical references with modernist clarity and exotic materials, was widely published in Domus, Casa Vogue and other leading design journals, and the firm opened branches across Europe and the Middle East. Within Vivai del Sud’s output, this trapezoidal, double-stacked bamboo chest is an exceptionally scarce model. Two closely comparable example – described as a “remarkable Italian trapezoidal bamboo chest” by Purini and Mariani for Vivai del Sud, circa 1975 – have been documented in the USA. Other bamboo chests by Vivai del Sud are of more conventional rectilinear form and lack this sharply faceted, prismatic geometry. No factory records or catalogues appear to publish an exact production run for this model, but period and contemporary experts consistently describe comparable Vivai del Sud bamboo case pieces as part of low-production series rather than standard lines, intended for specific high-end interiors. On the basis of currently documented examples, only a handful of these trapezoidal chests are known, and at the time of writing just a single pair of this exact design is publicly offered on the international market, underscoring the rarity and collectability of the present piece. An increasingly scarce and highly sculptural example of 1970s Italian organic modernism by one of Vivai del Sud’s key design partnerships.