Italian Design Club Sofas

Camaleonda sofa, designed by Mario Bellini and manufactured by B&B Italia in 1972. The set features six modules with backrest. High quality Italian azure linen velvet upholstery. ...

Anfibio sofa-bed by Alessandro Becchi for Giovannetti, 1972. Fully restored and upholstered with high-quality black Italian natural leather. Mattress upholstered with soft sheepski...

Barcelona daybed, designed by Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe in 1929 and manufactured by Knoll International in 1972. Made of chromed steel and coffee brown leather. Fully restored in Ital...

Pianura sectional sofa, designed by Mario Bellini and manufactured by the Italian brand Cassina in 1970. The set is composed of a three seater sofa and two lounge chairs. It featur...

Sesann three-seater sofa, designed by Gianfranco Frattini in 1970 and produced by the Italian manufacturer Cassina. It features brown alpaca velvet upholstery and a chrome tubular ca...

Pianura sectional sofa, designed by Mario Bellini and manufactured by the Italian brand Cassina in 1970. The set is composed of a three seater sofa. It features a brown velvet upho...

Set of 2 Pianura lounge chair, designed by Mario Bellini and manufactured by the Italian brand Cassina in 1970. It features a brown velvet upholstery and a solid walnut structure. ...

Sesann dining room set, designed by Gianfranco Frattini in 1970 and produced by the Italian manufacturer Cassina. It is composed of a three-seater sofa and an armchair. It features o...

Barcelona daybed, designed by Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe in 1929 and manufactured by Knoll International in 1972. Made of chromed steel and leather. Fully restored in Italy. The Barce...

Sesann three-seater sofa, designed by Gianfranco Frattini in 1970 and produced by the Italian manufacturer Cassina. It features azure velvet upholstery and a chrome tubular cage as s...

Set of 2 Barcelona lounge chair, designed by Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe in 1929 and manufactured by Knoll International in 1972. Made of chromed steel and leather. Excellent vintage co...

Soriana two-seater sofa, designed by Afra and Tobia Scarpa, and produced by the Italian manufacturer Cassina in 1969. It features its original brown leather upholstery. Winner of t...

Sesann two-seater sofa, designed by Gianfranco Frattini in 1970 and produced by the Italian manufacturer Cassina. It features black leather upholstery and a chrome tubular cage as s...

Camaleonda sofa, designed by Mario Bellini and manufactured by B&B Italia in 1972. The set features seven modules with backrest (four big modules and three small ones) and one armres...

Set of three Sesann lounge chairs, designed by Gianfranco Frattini in 1970 and produced by the Italian manufacturer Cassina. They features brown alpaca velvet upholstery and a chrome...

Pianura lounge chair, designed by Mario Bellini and manufactured by the Italian brand Cassina in 1970. It features a brown velvet upholstery and a solid walnut structure. Excellent...

Hovercraft is a two-seater sofa with a wooden frame and internal padding made of polyurethane foam. The down cushions are reinforced with polyurethane foam, and the upholstery is ful...

Cornaro two-seater sofa, designed by Carlo Scarpa and manufactured by Studio Simon in 1974. Made of Iroko wood, foam, and azure chenille velvet. Excellent vintage condition. Born in Venice on June 2nd, 1906, Carlo Scarpa began working very early. Only a year after he had first qualified as an architect in 1926, he began working for the Murano glassmakers Cappellin & Co. in a consultative capacity; from 1927, he began to experiment with the Murano glass, and this research not only gave him excellent results here but would also inform his progress for many years to come. Between 1935 and 1937, as he entered his thirties, Carlo Scarpa accepted his first important commission, the renovation of Venice’s Cà Foscari. He adapted the spaces of this stately University building which stands on the banks of the Grand Canal, creating rooms for the Dean’s offices and a new hall for academic ceremonies; Mario Sironi and Mario De Luigi were charged with doing the restoration work on the frescos. After 1945, Carlo Scarpa was constantly busy with new commissions, including various furnishings and designs for the renovation of Venice’s Hotel Bauer and designing a tall building in Padua and a residential area in Feltre, all worth mentioning. One of his key works, despite its relatively modest diminished proportions, was the first of many works which were to follow in the nineteen fifties: the [bookshop known as the] Padiglione del Libro, which stands in Venice’s Giardini di Castello and shows clearly Scarpa’s passion for the works of Frank Lloyd Wright. In the years which were to follow, after he had met the American architect, Scarpa repeated similar experiments on other occasions, as can be seen, in particular, in the sketches he drew up in 1953 for villa Zoppas in Conegliano, which show some of his most promising work. However, this work unfortunately never came to fruition. Carlo Scarpa later created three museum layouts to prove pivotal in how twentieth-century museums were set up from then on. Between 1955 and 1957, he completed extension work on Treviso’s Gipsoteca Canoviana [the museum that houses Canova’s sculptures] in Possagno, taking a similar experimental approach to the one he used for the Venezuelan Pavilion at [Venice’s] Giardini di Castello which he was building at the same time (1954-56). In Possagno Carlo Scarpa was to create one of his most incredible ever works, which inevitably bears comparison with two other museum layouts that he was working on over the same period, those of the Galleria Nazionale di Sicilia, housed in the Palazzo Abatellis in Palermo (1953-55) and at the Castelvecchio in Verona (1957- 1974), all of which were highly acclaimed, adding to his growing fame. Two other buildings, which are beautifully arranged in spatial terms, can be added to this long list of key works that were started and, in some cases, even completed during the nineteen fifties. After winning the Olivetti Award for architecture in 1956, Scarpa began work in Venice’s Piazza San Marco on an area destined to house products made by the Industrial manufacturers Ivrea. Over the same period (1959-1963), he also worked on renovating and restoring the gardens and ground floor of the Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice, which many consider one of his greatest works. While he worked on-site at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Carlo Scarpa also began building a villa in Udine for the Veritti family. To shed some light on how much his work evolved over the years, it may be useful to compare this work with that of his very last building, villa Ottolenghi Bardolino, which was near completion at the time of his sudden death in 1978. Upon completion of villa Veritti over the next ten years, without ever letting up on his work on renovation and layouts, Scarpa accepted some highly challenging commissions which were to make the most of his formal skills, working on the Carlo Felice Theatre in Genoa as well as another theatre in Vicenza. Towards the end of this decade, in 1969, Rina Brion commissioned Carlo Scarpa to build the Brion Mausoleum in San Vito d’Altivole (Treviso), a piece he continued to work on right up until the moment of his death. Nevertheless, even though he was totally absorbed by work on this mausoleum, plenty of other episodes can offer some insight into the final years of his career. As work on the San Vito d’Altivole Mausoleum began to lessen in 1973, Carlo Scarpa started building the new headquarters for the Banca Popolare di Verona. He drew up plans that were surprisingly different from the work he carried out simultaneously on the villa Ottolenghi. However, the plans Carlo Scarpa drew up, at different times, for a monument in Brescia’s Piazza della Loggia commemorating victims of the terrorist attack on May 28th, 1974, make a sharp contrast to the work he carried out in Verona, almost as if there is a certain hesitation after so many mannered excesses. The same Pietas that informs his designs for the Piazza Della Loggia can also be seen in the presence of the water that flows through the Brion Mausoleum, almost as if to give a concrete manifestation of pity in this twentieth-century work of art. Carlo Scarpa has put together a highly sophisticated collection of structures occupying the mausoleum’s L-shaped space stretching across both sides of the old San Vito d’Altivole cemetery. A myriad of different forms and an equally large number of different pieces, all of which are separate and yet inextricably linked to form a chain that seems to offer no promise of continuity, arising out of these are those whose only justification for being there is to bear the warning “si vis vitam, para mortem,” [if you wish to experience life prepare for death] as if to tell a tale that suggests the circle of time, joining together the commemoration of the dead with a celebration of life. At the entrance of the Brion Mausoleum stand the “propylaea,” followed by a cloister that ends by a small chapel, with an arcosolium bearing the family sarcophagi, the central pavilion, held in place on broken cast iron supports, stands over a mirror-shaped stretch of water and occupies one end of the family’s burial space. The musical sound of the walkways, teamed with the luminosity of these harmoniously blended spaces, shows how, in keeping with his strong sense of vision, Carlo Scarpa could make the most of all his many skills to come up with this truly magnificent space. As well as an outstanding commitment to architectural work, with the many projects we have already seen punctuating his career, Carlo Scarpa also made many equally important forays into the world of applied arts. Between 1926 and 1931, he worked for the Murano glassmakers Cappellin, later taking what he had learned with him when he went to work for the glassmakers Venini from 1933 until the 1950s. The story of how he came to work on furniture design is different, however, and began with the furniture he designed to replace lost furnishings during his renovation of Cà Foscari. The later mass-produced furniture started differently, given that many pieces were originally one-off designs “made to measure.” Industrial manufacturing using these designs as prototypes came into being thanks to the continuity afforded him by Dino Gavina, who, as well as this, also invited Carlo Scarpa to become president of the company Gavina SpA, later to become SIMON, a company Gavina founded eight years on, in partnership with Maria Simoncini (whose own name accounts for the choice of company name). Carlo Scarpa and Gavina forged a strong bond in 1968 as they began to put various models of his into production for Simon, such as the “Doge” table, which also formed the basis for the “Sarpi” and “Florian” tables. In the early seventies, other tables that followed included “Valmarana,” “Quatour,” and “Orseolo.” While in 1974, they added a couch and armchair, “Cornaro,” to the collection and the “Toledo” bed...

Camaleonda sofa, designed by Mario Bellini and manufactured by B&B Italia in 1972. The set features three modules with big backrest, and two modules with small backrest. Alpaca...

Camaleonda sofa, designed by Mario Bellini and manufactured by B&B Italia in 1972. The set features seven modules with backrest (four big modules and three small ones) and one armre...

Barcelona lounge chair, designed by Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe in 1929 and manufactured by Knoll International in 1972. Made of chromed steel and leather. Excellent vintage condition. ...

Anfibio sofa-bed by Alessandro Becchi for Giovannetti, 1972. Fully restored and upholstered with high-quality grey Italian natural leather. Mattress upholstered with soft sheepskin wool. The Anfibio sofa ranks among the most outstanding cult products of Italian design. It is innovative, original, and highly functional; it is a revolutionary sofa-bed, a symbol of high quality and sapient artisanry. It is possible to find it in the permanent collection of 13 museums worldwide, among which the MoMa in New York, since 1972. Alessandro Becchi designed the “Anfibio” sofa for the Italian manufacturer Giovannetti in 1970. It is characterized by generous dimensions and soft, embracing shapes that invite relaxation and comfort. It reminds a floating dinghy thanks to its lack of rigid mechanism. This feature inspired its name, which means amphibious. Furthermore, the sofa presents a rectangular steel structure and padding in non-deformable high-density polyurethane, covered with acrylic thermo-welded fibers and protective fabric. The Anfibio sofa by Giovannetti is available covered in leather or fabric and several colors. This artwork is the ideal convertible solution, the perfect combination of aesthetic research and innovative household living. Alessandro Becchi was born in Florence in 1946. He studied at ISIA in his hometown, and in the late 60s, he began his career as a designer. In 1970 he designed the revolutionary Anfibio sofa for Giovannetti. In 1972, thanks to the success of Anfibio, he was invited to the exhibition “Italy: the New Domestic Landscape” at the Museum of Modern Arts in New York. This date opens in close collaboration with Giovannetti. He designed a series of sofa-beds, such as Only You, Brando, Diletto, and the famous armchairs Le Bugie...

Soriana three seater sofa, designed by Afra and Tobia Scarpa, and produced by the Italian manufacturer Cassina in 1969. Re-upholstered with brown ve...

Camaleonda sofa, designed by Mario Bellini and manufactured by B&B Italia in 1972. The set features two modules with backrest and two armrests. Green linen velvet upholstery. Fu...

Sesann two-seater sofa, designed by Gianfranco Frattini in 1970 and produced by the Italian manufacturer Cassina. It features wool bouclé upholstery and a chrome tubular cage as s...

The Sesann lounge chair was designed by Gianfranco Frattini in 1970 and produced by the Italian manufacturer Cassina. This lounge chair features a chocolate brown alpaca velvet upho...

The Sesann lounge chair was designed by Gianfranco Frattini in 1970 and produced by the Italian manufacturer Cassina. This lounge chair features a chocolate brown alpaca velvet upho...

“Camaleonda” sofa, in white velvet upholstery, designed by Mario Bellini and manufactured by B&B Italia in 1972. Fully restored and reupholstered in Italy. The sofa is very comfort...

“Camaleonda” sofa, in red cotton upholstery, designed by Mario Bellini and manufactured by B&B Italia in 1972. Fully restored and reupholstered in Italy. The sofa is very comfo...

The Sesann lounge chair was designed by Gianfranco Frattini in 1970 and produced by the Italian manufacturer Cassina. This set is composed of two lounge chairs upholstered in tobacco and chocolate brown alpaca velvet. Sesann is characterized by an organic and informal shape and is defined by the tubular metal detail that wraps around the soft, upholstered seat. In the 1970s, the Cassina catalogue...

Togo modular sofa, designed by Michel Ducaroy and manufactured by Ligne Roset in 1974. The set is composed of 2 modules. Purple cotton upholstery. Ex...

Soriana living room set, designed by Afra and Tobia Scarpa, and produced by the Italian manufacturer Cassina in 1969. The set is composed of a three-seater sofa, a lounge chair and a...

Sesann armchair, designed by Gianfranco Frattini in 1970 and produced by the Italian manufacturer Cassina. It features khaki brown velvet upholstery and a chrome tubular cage as stru...

Set of 2 “Bibambola” sofa designed by Mario Bellini for B&B Italia. Original vintage version from 1976, recently reupholstered by the previous owner with a light grey fabric. This ...

Sesann dining room set, designed by Gianfranco Frattini in 1970 and produced by the Italian manufacturer Cassina. It is composed of a two-seater sofa and two armchairs. It features...

Two-seater “Simone” sofa, designed and manufactured by Studio Simon in 1975. The structure is made of black lacquered wood. An azure velvet big seat completes the sofa. The min...

Brown leather “Coronado” living room set composed of two armchairs and one three-seat sofa, designed by Afra and Tobia Scarpa in 1966 and produced by the Italian manufacturer C&B Ita...

Sesann three-seater sofa, designed by Gianfranco Frattini in 1970 and produced by the Italian manufacturer Cassina. It features ocher velvet upholstery and a chrome tubular cage as s...

“Bibambola” sofa designed by Mario Bellini for B&B Italia. Original vintage version from 1976, recently reupholstered by the previous owner with a light grey fabric. This comfortab...

Afra & Tobia Scarpa “Soriana” chaise longue, Alcantara and metal, Italy, 1969. The Soriana lounge chair is low and soft and invites the sitter to sink in. Its peculiar feature is the...