The profile of a leading company in high quality furniture production

Roda was founded in 1990 as a company specialising in the production of top quality outdoor furniture.
The company’s success was assured thanks to the passion and the experience, combined with the acute intuition of its founder, Roberto Pompa, one of the first Italians to work on the new Interior Garden concept: an interior garden that withdraws the increasingly transient boundary between indoor and outdoor.

Roda really established itself in Italy and Europe from 1990 to 2000, specialising in teak furniture production distinguished by its quality and excellent design.
During this period, it also becomes the Italian distributor of a number of companies in the outdoor furniture sector, such as Fermob, Kettal and Dedon.

The first turnaround came in 2000: Roda decided to target the public directly, with a major advertising campaign, as well as focusing on the trade in its specific sector and indoor furniture retail outlets, which are demonstrating an increasing appreciation of its collections.
Since then, its turnover has grown considerably, with constant trends of around 30-40% up on the previous year.

Following this course, in 2004, Roda was the first manufacturer in this sector to design furniture that could be used both indoors and outdoors.

It moved up a gear once again in 2005. It began working with the Rodolfo Dordoni design firm, which took over the art direction of the company and developed Net-Work, a collection that expresses this concept and this new way of life perfectly.

Roda began to make a name for itself as a trend setter, interpreting the outdoors, with its connotations of relaxation, emotion, informality and elegance, as contiguous with the indoors and vice versa.

The Design Process

Inside and outside, the home and the garden are distinct, separate and independent spaces. This was certainly true in the past, but today this distinction is beginning to disappear. This ideal division line is becoming increasingly less marked. Roda’s style is based on this modern way of living, offering the freedom to choose and live in one’s home in a more personal way.
So, if indoors and outdoors are no longer so far apart, it is logical to think of a consequent sensory continuity. Roda has interpreted this idea with furniture proposals of impeccable workmanship.
Resting in the garden, on the terrace or on a beach, just outside the four walls of our home, is not just about taking possession of an external spatial dimension. It is actually about another expression of living, coinciding with the perception of a contemporary wellbeing in the chance to enjoy open spaces, even if they are only small in size, and the perception of an intangible luxury, understood as the accumulation and fulfilment of one’s time. However, living, both in and outside, is a complex dimension of being, and occupying the open ground is different from furnishing a room.

Roda has seized on this potential and has dedicated recent years to researching, studying and experimenting with the objective of creating not just a new line of outdoor furniture, but another piece of a possible world.
By working on the technological and formal languages of design, it has managed to generate an interesting blend of interior and exterior design, choosing to equip the outdoors as if it were an extra room, or a room twinned with all the other rooms in the home.
The furniture becomes an expression of this doubling effect and Roda is its interpreter. Sophistication, harmony and the rejection of all set ideas are the basic principles behind a new concept of informal luxury.

Therefore, thanks to the creations of Rodolfo Dordoni (the Net-Work line, created two years ago, and the new collections), Roda has applied a design philosophy which can be summed up in the In/Out concept: furniture chosen as an expression of the inhabitant’s personality, which moves by means of osmosis between indoors and outdoors, without interruption, in a poetic blend of material and detail, form and function, technology and tradition.

Ambiguity thus becomes wealth and uncertainty becomes an opportunity for new possibilities. The furnishings alternate between indoors and out, immanent, while the settings slide by like holiday slides.