Cavallino restaurant | India Mahdavi

On the edge of the site of the factory, the Gestione Sportiva racing department and the new flagship store in Maranello, Cavallino has been completely renovated and redesigned by India Mahdavi and her studio, in order to revitalise its identity, design, interior architecture and garden, balancing comfort and taste to celebrate the delight of an Italian way of life.

In the old farmhouse building, with its new red façade, India Mahdavi has played with the traditional decorative vocabulary of the Italian trattoria and all its architectural codes and furniture, inspired by the Ferrari world, by its spirit of conquest, its audacity and its joyful prestige.

From the entrance, the restaurant’s rooms are connected via a series of arches that carve the spaces with rhythm, giving energy to the perspectives, and that seem to guide visitors to their table with a friendly smile.

The floor is covered with traditional terracotta tiles, alternating between earth and ivory tiles in a chequerboard pattern, like a well-ironed tablecloth. Oak panelling on the walls where the tables lean and the bench backrests made of yellow leather with rounded and graphic shapes outline the rooms with delight. Also on the walls, rare celebratory collections of photographs, posters, souvenirs and memorabilia reveal the spirit of the place and the story behind Ferrari's incredible industrial and sporting adventure.

The garden, redesigned with the help of Marco Bay, forms a patio like an open-air dining room – a haven of greenery in the shade of a pergola. Upstairs, a balcony borders two private lounges on a rooftop terrace. Here, guests can enjoy an open-air meal with a direct view on the main entrance to the factory at number 4 on Maranello's most famous street.

On the ground floor, the Enzo Room, with its poplar wood panelling, also draws on this story of emotion and passion. The founder used to sit here, in front of the fireplace, watching the races. India Mahdavi brings this intimate room back to life, through the creation of a private dining room breached by a large bay window, with movable wooden slats, opening onto a sunny driveway – as if Enzo Ferrari had just parked his car. 

To restore the trattoria's modernity and infuse it with a new identity, India Mahdavi has revisited Ferrari's heritage and visual vocabulary. Using digitisation and enlargement, the firm’s logo, the Prancing Horse, was pixelized to create a unique identity for the restaurant.

The pixelized Cavallino was applied on many surfaces and materials – on perforated metal for the entrance gate, glass mosaic on the walls, on the restaurant's wallpaper and even in the Burano lace that adorns the white net curtains on the windows, as in any self-respecting trattoria.

In addition to playing with the motif of Ferrari engines, which she arranged into small enfilades, India Mahdavi also designed a new leather seat exclusively for this location: somewhere between a chair and an armchair.

Undertaken with wit and communicative joy, the restaurant is revived and reopened as a joyful, optimistic and friendly response to a year full of separations, and is an invitation to share and spend time together at the table, thanks also to the collaboration with selected partners of excellence in the Made in Italy industry and manufacturing, which over the last year have worked assiduously with India Mahdavi to create a series of furniture, objects and custom-made elements produced exclusively for Ferrari. “Cavallino celebrates the delights of an Italian way of life, with a certain sense of comfort and taste – it’s a new experience brought to the Italian trattoria.”

Cavallino Restaurant
Via Abetone Inferiore, 1, 41053 Maranello MO
www.ristorantecavallino.com
Instagram: @FerrariStyle