Nathalie

In 1978, Bassetti founded its textile division under the name of Flou with the aim of developing a set of products capable of offering a complete service for beds: frames, mattresses, pillows, duvets, linen, coordinated upholstery in colours and patterns; all the elements of this line of products are removable and interchangeable and the final result was the "Textile Bed" embodied by this model whose concept is an extension of the existing "Piumone" (duvet) and was accurately described by the designer himself. He said: "Sometimes the simple word or concept expressed in words generates the form. "Textile Bed" is a form that is almost not designed but determined by the use of the proposed material: very well suited to the idea of bed, the use of the adjective "textile" arises from the extended concept of Piumone; a new way of dressing the bed, a new way of making it more comfortable and welcoming. It proved easy to extend (and not only formally) the concept of Piumone - fresh to look at and warm to lie under - to the whole bed, proposing a unitary image in which the Piumone, with its soft folds and shadows, rises to form the headboard. A headboard that not only serves to support the pillows but to contain and conceal them during the daytime. The curved top of the pillow just below the headboard completes the soft shape of the Piumone and creates a new simple and unitary image. That is how "Textile Bed" by Flou, of Bassetti, was born." The soft components are: the pillow, the pillow cover on the headboard, the duvet, the mattress, and the bed base cover. Nathalie is universally recognised to be the forebear of a new way of sleeping. Over the years, it has turned into a full-fledged system with the possibility of choosing between four bases (rigid, with a container, in aluminium) and three different bed frames (with adjustable slats, orthopaedic, operated manually or electrically). The upholstery of the frame is completely removable and coordinated with the bed linen. The headboard is also available in the manually operated reclinable version. Nathalie in some way follows in the tracks of the Maralunga sofa of a few years earlier although it is no longer static and immobile but changing and transformable, and whose hallmark lies in a "detail that marks the image: the bow on the side of the pillows" (Pasca, 1991, p. 89).