De Padova

For decades De Padova was much more than a furniture company: a Milanese shop where Italians discovered design from the rest of the world, and later a brand with its own sober, elegant collection. At the centre of it all is a woman, Maddalena De Padova.

Design from the North

In the 1950s Fernando and Maddalena De Padova began importing furniture and objects from Scandinavia, which they sold in their shop on Via Montenapoleone in Milan. For Italy it was something completely new: the light wood and the simple, warm forms of Nordic design, which would change the way people furnished their homes for good.

Eames and Herman Miller

In the 1960s, on a trip to Basel, Maddalena saw Charles Eames's Wire Chair for the first time. A few months later she met the American company Herman Miller and obtained a licence to produce in Italy the furniture of Charles and Ray Eames and George Nelson, as Vitra was doing for the rest of Europe. ICF De Padova was founded, with its factory in Vimodrone, just outside Milan, and the large shop on Corso Venezia opened, becoming a point of reference for architects and design lovers.

Maddalena and Magistretti

In the 1970s, after Fernando's death, Maddalena ran the company alone. It was then that her long collaboration with Vico Magistretti began: he designed first office furniture and then many of the best-known pieces in the catalogue. In the 1980s De Padova gave up the ICF brand and the Herman Miller licence and founded Edizioni De Padova, its own collection, to which Achille Castiglioni and Dieter Rams, the designer of Braun, also contributed. In the Corso Venezia shop Maddalena presented the furniture of the American Shaker religious communities, essential and perfect, which became one of the collection's sources of inspiration.

From the 1990s to today

At the end of the 1990s De Padova furnished the café of the Centre Pompidou in Paris with Renzo Piano, and later other projects of his, such as the restaurant of the Morgan Library in New York. In 2004 Maddalena De Padova received a lifetime Compasso d'Oro. Patricia Urquiola and the Japanese studio Nendo later also worked for the company. In 2015 De Padova joined forces with Boffi, the historic kitchen and bathroom company; at the beginning of 2026 the two merged into a single company, Boffi|DePadova, which that same year won another Compasso d'Oro with Raffaella Mangiarotti's D'Antan armchair.

Sources

• De Padova – History
• Wikipedia – Premio Compasso d'oro 2004 (it)