PurplePrice Mag · · 2 min read
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Cappellini is the company that, more than any other, has been able to discover designers before they became famous. Many of the names that shaped design in the 1990s and 2000s, from Jasper Morrison to Tom Dixon, from Marc Newson to Marcel Wanders, saw their first designs produced here.
From workshop to design
The company was founded in 1946 in Carugo, in Brianza, by Enrico Cappellini. For thirty years it made traditional wooden furniture for the Italian market. The turning point came at the end of the 1970s, when his son Giulio Cappellini, an architect, joined the company. Giulio turned the family furniture business into a research laboratory for contemporary design, open to the masters but above all to the young.
Kuramata and Mendini
Among the first designers were the Japanese Shiro Kuramata, who from 1987 was the company's leading designer, and Alessandro Mendini. Cappellini produces Kuramata's wavy Side 1 and Side 2 chests of drawers (1970), with drawers all of different sizes, and other furniture in Plexiglas. From Mendini came the Proust armchair, a Baroque armchair covered in coloured dots like an Impressionist painting, a symbol of Postmodernism.
New talent
In the 1980s and 1990s came the young designers whom Giulio Cappellini sought out in schools and exhibitions all over Europe:
- the Thinking Man's Chair by the Englishman Jasper Morrison, a small armchair in painted steel tube and strip;
- the S-Chair by Tom Dixon, an S-shaped chair covered in woven rush, now at MoMA;
- the Embryo Chair and the Orgone chaise longue by the Australian Marc Newson;
- the Knotted Chair by the Dutchman Marcel Wanders, later the founder of Moooi;
- the Rainbow Chair by Patrick Norguet and the Cloud shelving by the Bouroullec brothers.
Cappellini today
In 2004 Cappellini joined the Poltrona Frau group, which since 2014 has belonged to the American company Haworth; since 2025 it has been part of the same division as Cassina and Zanotta. Giulio Cappellini, regarded as one of design's great “talent scouts”, received a lifetime Compasso d'Oro in 2022.
Sources
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