Red Spina

Italian design studio Cara e Davide is known internationally for its well-made tables, chairs and storage cabinets. The brand’s sculptural furnishings, which feature sleek curving forms and architectural columns that are attention-grabbing in any space, owe to ongoing research in regional materials, processes and experimentation with various techniques.

Cara e Davide comes from the names of the studio's founding designers, South African artist Cara Judd and Italian artist Davide Gramatica. They met while they were attending IED Milano, studying product design. 

After graduating in 2011, Judd and Gramatica began their professional design careers separately — they explored various areas that included apprenticeships at ateliers and workshops and working with both small studios as well as large-scale companies. Five years later, the two decided to merge their talents and established the Cara e Davide studio in Milan. That same year, they exhibited their first furniture collection at the Salone del Mobile, garnering acclaim among critics and private clients. The studio unveiled a second collection at the London Design Fair.

Cara e Davide specializes in designing contemporary furniture — they’ve created bold pieces by working with wood-based filament printing technologies, Rosso Levanto marble, aluminum and more. The studio’s offerings are frequently produced in collaboration with artisans from South Africa and Italy. The brand has partnered with a range of manufacturers, art spaces and retailers to create these works, including Rinascente, Medulum, Portego, Uniqka, Aybar Gallery and Galerie Philia. When Judd and Gramatica are not in their studio, they’re teaching product design at IED Milan.

On 1stDibs, discover a range of Cara e Davide tables, seating, case pieces and storage cabinets.

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.