Prostoria – a brand built on the modernist tradition of Croatia and the surrounding region, recently recapturing the attention of the global cultural audience

Prostoria belongs to the category of young brands without a long tradition, with high-quality designer furniture, and as such primarily speaks to architects and interior designers engaged on public and residential projects.

What they expect from a brand such as Prostoria is a relationship built on trust, space-saving furniture that gives prominence to space, and timeless furniture that changes people’s lives for the better and remains indispensable even 15 years after.

Having overviewed global trends and gained an understanding of the target group, the agency discovered a tension that called for a solution – how to create places that look beautiful because they say something about the people who dwell in them (from the outside), but also make people feel comfortable (from the inside).

What makes Prostoria special and different is its dedication to details, building relationships, cooperation with designers, but somehow it was held back due to a lack of tradition, a recognizable style on the global scene, icons, and unknown provenance.

Can such weaknesses be leveraged and turned into strengths?

Maroje Mrduljaš described Polygon as „a standard modernist typology of a seat of modest dimensions that meets all functional parameters, without burdening the space with bulkiness and immobility. (…) The result is a product that seems familiar, even a bit old-fashioned, but at the same time extremely contemporary.“

This description offered an insight showing that Prostoria’s uniqueness hails from the impact of architecture, art and design of the environment in which it was created, which the MoMA depicts as a Concrete Utopia.

Such tradition put together with the Prostoria’s dedication to detail and one-on-one collaboration with top designers led to the furniture distinguished by modernism and guided by the principles of rationality, lightness and freedom. It is precisely because we come from a country where reduction has always been an imperative, but only to the extent of maintaining comfort, we can offer something special and new to the world of modern design (furniture), which is why we can argue:

If life is complicated, living needn’t be, so the brand, for the sake of simplicity, gets rid of everything unnecessary, provided that it should never sacrifice comfort.

Prostoria / Tomislav Knezović (Owner & CEO), Iva Šilović Grabovac, B.Arch (Project Manager)

Bruketa&Žinić&Grey / Tea Silvia Vlahović (Strategic Planning Director), Davor Bruketa (Creative Director), Maša Ivanov (Account Director), Ana Krstić (Strategy Planner)

M.Arch. Maroje Mrduljaš (Architecture and Design Theorist)