The Muskoka chair is a fixed point of the Canadian summer: wide arms, low slouch, angled at the water and largely unchanged for the better part of a century. It has never asked to be improved, yet Peroni Nastro Azzurro has reimagined it with an Italian twist.
The Peroni Aperitivo Chair, launched in June, adds two new details to an icon. The first is a built-in holder for a bottle, and the second is a detachable serving board that lifts away and carries food from the kitchen down to the dock. These are careful interventions, but between them they convert a seat designed for sitting into one designed for hosting, turning the Muskoka Chair into a different piece of furniture entirely.
The inspiration comes from aperitivo, the sun-dappled Italian hour between afternoon and evening when friends gather over something cold and something small before dinner. “Aperitivo is one of Italy’s most cherished rituals,” says Joy Ghosh, Head of Marketing at Asahi Canada, who notes that Canadians tend to associate it with travel memories rather than with home. The chair aims to close that gap.
Peroni has been making the same case elsewhere, through Canadian author, television personality and food expert Antoni Porowski, who assembled a board of delicacies to go alongside it. Italian staples like bresaola and prosciutto, Taleggio and Parmigiano Reggiano cheese, ripe tomatoes dressed in olive oil and thyme, Castelvetrano olives, and cracked black pepper on top. Deliberately unfussy, and better for it, if rather addictive.
Peroni Nastro Azzurro was first brewed in Rome in 1963 to reflect the Italian luxury then emerging in fashion and design, and it is still made with the brand’s own Nostrano dell’Isola maize for that particular crispness. Six decades on, it has found its way to a dock in Muskoka, which, this August, is precisely where Range Rover House will be.
