Costantini Isabella

The Isabella Costantini furniture company draws on long-revered design styles and brings classic flourishes to its contemporary pieces. The subdued and uncomplicated shapes of the brand’s cocktail tables and nightstands come alive with harmonious curves, while its sleek sideboards and dressers are frequently adorned with geometric hardware in gold leaf.

In 2003, Isabella Costantini opened her workshop in Ascoli Piceno, a town in central Italy. She finds inspiration in classic European design styles and draws on the timeless attributes of modernism and Art Deco but her work very much reflects her own unique vision.

Costantini took the long road to interior design. After a short-lived career in ballet, traveling with the Budapest Opera throughout Europe, an orthopedic issue forced her to cut her occupation as a dancer short. She used this life change as an opportunity to pursue a new path.

Costantini traveled around Europe, finding inspiration in the numerous workshops and studios she visited, sparking her enthusiasm for interior design, which naturally flowed into creating her own furniture.

While Costantini is passionate about design, she doesn't relegate herself to just one field. She has secured work as a product developer, interior designer and creative consultant for many areas of industry. Today Costantini’s brand continues to produce top-tier custom furniture for an ever-growing elite clientele. 

Find Isabella Costantini dining tables, storage pieces and console tables on 1stDibs.

The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw sweeping social change and major scientific advances — both of which contributed to a new aesthetic: modernism. Rejecting the rigidity of Victorian artistic conventions, modernists sought a new means of expression. References to the natural world and ornate classical embellishments gave way to the sleek simplicity of the Machine Age. Architect Philip Johnson characterized the hallmarks of modernism as “machine-like simplicity, smoothness or surface [and] avoidance of ornament.”

Early practitioners of modernist design include the De Stijl (“The Style”) group, founded in the Netherlands in 1917, and the Bauhaus School, founded two years later in Germany.

Followers of both groups produced sleek, spare designs — many of which became icons of daily life in the 20th century. The modernists rejected both natural and historical references and relied primarily on industrial materials such as metal, glass, plywood, and, later, plastics. While Bauhaus principals Marcel Breuer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe created furniture from mass-produced, chrome-plated steel, American visionaries like Charles and Ray Eames worked in materials as novel as molded plywood and fiberglass. Today, Breuer’s Wassily chair, Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona chair — crafted with his romantic partner, designer Lilly Reich — and the Eames lounge chair are emblems of progressive design and vintage originals are prized cornerstones of collections.

It’s difficult to overstate the influence that modernism continues to wield over designers and architects — and equally difficult to overstate how revolutionary it was when it first appeared a century ago. But because modernist furniture designs are so simple, they can blend in seamlessly with just about any type of décor. Don’t overlook them.