Lineabeta: art direction for the historic Italian bathroom furniture brand

Lineabeta is an Italian bathroom furniture brand founded in 1980 with the goal of offering a fresh, functional, simple, and ironic everyday experience, summarized by the payoff “everyday design”.

HENRY & CO. was entrusted with the art direction of the brand, a project that involved various company departments and competencies, touching all the key brand touchpoints.

With Catalogue 28, HENRY & CO. aimed to lighten and characterize the brand image with a fresh, dynamic, and minimal touch.

The catalog browsing experience was simplified using the same technique as old-fashioned paper phonebooks: portions of paper were removed from the page’s edge depending on the chapter in question, speeding up navigation and facilitating commercial activities.

One of the first interventions by HENRY & CO. featured “Careto,” (“little cart” in the Venetian dialect), a practical bathroom trolley designed using eco-design principles: The structure consists of 4 identical aluminum modules, cut and bent, while the shelves are made of simple bamboo boards, one of the strongest natural materials in the world.

Careto is designed to be easy to produce, assemble/disassemble, and recycle, and its compact form makes it easy to move, adapting to all home environments.

A second insight from HENRY & CO. materialized in the design of “Regolo,” a multifunctional product for the shower equipped with a mirror. The idea for Regolo arose from observing user behavior in the bathroom area: despite many male users being accustomed to shaving under the shower, no product on the market seemed to address this need appropriately; hence, the idea of incorporating an adjustable-height mirror.

Again, HENRY & CO. designed the piece following eco-design principles: Regolo is crafted from a single piece of cut and bent aluminum, and the mirror is easily removable to ensure easy assembly, disassembly, and recyclability.

In an operation aimed at clearing out stock inventory, HENRY & CO. developed a series of limited edition illustrations, sparking a trend in the bathroom furnishings market that echoed throughout the market. The three limited editions were centered on three themes: world cities, doodles, and claims.

Thanks to this operation, the company was able to completely clear its inventory, acting with minimal impact and maximizing the result.

The Milano Design Week 2018 saw Lineabeta make a splash thanks to the stand designed by HENRY & CO.

The exhibition walls were “invaded” by a cheeky crowd of doodles, turning the displayed products into metaphors of an imaginary world. A showerhead becomes a lamppost, a faucet becomes a hydrant, a soap dish becomes a spaceship, and so on…catalogs have to be long, heavy, and bulky?

HENRY & CO. designed the catalog 28 for Lineabeta customers by challenging marketing preconceptions about commercial catalogs.

The result is “the Saponetta,” a pocket-sized catalog with the volume of a bar of solid soap. It’s a cheeky and ironic catalog, that with its compactness and synthesis integrates sustainability principles such as a significant paper saving and the reuse of the company’s soap packaging.

The visual design introduced with the art direction by HENRY & CO. amazed and impressed the jury of the Annual Award 2018, which awarded the communication materials created, placing them on the winners’ list.