Ciarmoli Queda Studio

Officina Ciani’s handmade furniture and lighting pieces combine traditional Florentine wrought-iron design and modern and contemporary styles.

The company’s history can be traced to the Emporio San Firenze, founded in 1939 by Bruno Ciani. During its heyday, the Emporio was known throughout Italy for its skill in designing and producing Florentine wrought-iron furnishings such as chairs, dining tables and lamps.

Today, Officina Ciani continues the Ciani family’s legacy by creating classic Italian wrought-iron pieces that blend seamlessly with modern 21st-century designs. Items such as chandeliers, wall lights, sofas and coffee tables are made with iron, steel, bronze and brass and enhanced with glass, mirrors, crystal, marble, wood and fabrics. The Ammos floor lamp, designed in collaboration with Ciarmoli Queda Studio, features a double-tapered stem upholstered in stingray skin marked with brass accents and a drum-shaped shade in pleated silk. 

Officina Ciani also has a line of high-quality garden furniture, which includes the Perennial chaise longue by Italian designer Silvia Refaldi and the timeless Rombo chair with a “curls and curves” structure. The Piazza outdoor dining table, inspired by the piazzas of Tuscany, has a Carrara marble top and semi-circular iron legs. Officina Ciani’s outdoor furniture features zinc-treated iron with a powder finish and weatherproof upholstery for durability.

Officina Ciani’s indoor and outdoor lighting and furniture collections are highly sought after by interior designers, landscape architects and aficionados of traditional Florentine wrought-iron pieces. Its furnishings have been featured in numerous international publications, including Marie Claire Maison, Casa Chic, Architectural Digest and Gardenia magazine.

On 1stDibs, discover a range of contemporary Officina Ciani lighting, seating, tables and more.

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.