Marble marvel: the Senato Hotel speaker hits all the right notes

The Senato Hotel has joined forces with stone specialist Pietre di Monitillo on a new piece for its guests to enjoy during their stay. The Senato speaker, unveiled this week, was developed by the hotel’s creative director, Pier Giorgio Lomascolo, in collaboration with designer Efrem Bonacina, the Puglia-based stone company and Milan’s Politecnico. ‘Senato speaker wishes to embody the beauty of the invisible, to provide weight to the majesty of good sound through noble materials,’ says Lomascolo. 

This project follows the first collaboration with Senato Hotel Milano, which already features Monitillo’s iPhone ‘passive speaker’, OVO, in all of its superior rooms and junior suites. Carved out of a block of stone, the speaker works as an amplifier of sound thanks to its carefully-crafted internal structure of holes and bends, developed by Politecnico’s Design Lab with Lomascolo. 

The new piece takes Lomascolo’s penchant for materiality and sound to a new direction. The Senato speaker is in fact equipped with Bowers & Wilkins CCM632 loudspeaker, encased within a grid-like structure featuring marble and brass-coated aluminium panels. The choice of materials is, as usual, key to the design: marble, on the one hand, is an ideal material to amplify sound waves, while metal is used to enhance crisp vibrations. 

The Senato speaker

‘A material rigid yet polished like marble tends to reflect the quasi entirety of the acoustic radiation, like a mirror does with light. At the same time marble is also considered soundproofing: thanks to its high specific weight, marble deflects sound waves,’ explains Politecnico’s Valentina Rognoli. ‘When marble is moulded correctly, this property makes marble apt to interesting applications in the world of sound research.’

The speaker will be installed at the hotel but also available to purchase from Pietre di Monitillo, allowing guests to take a musical souvenir home with them.