This article is part of our Design special report previewing Milan Design Week.
‘A Table That’s Made of Air’
Carlo Mollino (1905-1973), a familiar figure in Italy’s mid-century designers pantheon, rarely had his works produced commercially, making them highly coveted by collectors. In 2020, his Vertebra table, a glass-topped dining table with a skeletal plywood base, designed in 1950 for an Italian publishing company, fetched $6.2 million at a Sotheby’s auction.
“It was a huge amount for a table that’s made of air,” said Luca Fuso, the chief executive of the Italian furniture company Cassina. Acting on behalf of Zanotta, one of Cassina’s subsidiaries, Mr. Fuso acquired the rights to reproduce Vertebra along with 29 other Mollino designs in a public auction staged by Italy’s state property agency. (Mollino left no heirs.) Cassina’s winning bid of 750,000 euros (about $864,000) bought it exclusive command of the collection until 2043, when the rights will revert to the public domain.
Like its forerunner, today’s Vertebra is oak-veneered plywood with legs that mimic the inner structure of a vintage airplane wing; Mollino also designed aircraft. The glass top is about 40 inches wide and half an inch thick, and is available in lengths of 9.8 feet or 10.5 feet. It can be seen along with six other revivified Mollino designs throughout Milan Design Week at the Zanotta showroom, 25-27 Via Durini, Milan; zanotta.com. — ARLENE HIRST
A Show Honors Gianfranco Frattini
The exhibition “Gianfranco Frattini 1926-2026” is part of a yearlong celebration of the Italian architect and designer, who was born a century ago and died in 2004 at 77. Occupying two niches in a furniture museum within Sforzesco Castle, the medieval fortification near Milan’s Sempione Park, the show features re-editions of Frattini’s work from the 1950s through the 1980s against a backdrop of panels lacquered in brick red — a color he loved.
Presented there are shiny updates of important pieces Frattini designed for major European clients, including Artemide, Cassina, Gubi, Poltrona Frau, Tacchini and Torri Lana. (The companies created new finishes or colors for the occasion). The show was organized by Frattini’s daughter and archivist, Emanuela Frattini Magnusson, working with Pietro Todeschini, an architect based in Milan and Verona, and Fiorella Mattio, a curator at the castle.
Noting that the Museum of Furniture and Wood Sculpture represents design history starting in the 1400s in its niches, Ms. Frattini Magnusson said she found it “just incredibly special and meaningful” to carve out a pair off spaces for her father’s work. Among the displays are a set of four nesting tables he designed in 1966 for Cassina that form a drum-shaped sculpture when stacked (shown). The re-edition is in Pinot Noir lacquer and retains the original removable laminate table tops that flip between black and white.
The exhibition is open Tuesday through April 26 at Sforzesco Castle, Piazza Castello, Milan; milanocastello.it, gianfrancofrattini.com. — STEPHEN TREFFINGER
A 1960s Lamp Makes a Comeback
Medusa, a lamp designed in the 1960s by Carlo Nason of Italy, has been brought back into production by Established & Sons and is making its debut at the Salone del Mobile — in table, pendant and wall versions. Made of multilayered, mouth-blown opaline glass, the lamp takes its name from its resemblance to a sea creature. “Medusa originally had no name at all, just a catalog number,” wrote Mr. Nason, 90, in an email. “My wife could never remember that number.” Instead, she used the Italian word for jellyfish.
Medusa is the second Nason lamp to be reissued by the British company Established & Sons. The relationship began several years ago after Yu Wang, a partner in the company, became enamored with a Nason table lamp resembling a scoop of vanilla ice cream in a pedestal cup. That design, called Gelato, debuted last year during Milan Design Week.
Mr. Nason said he designed Medusa at a time when Italian glassmaking was rooted in tradition. “Most pieces followed a very classical approach,” he recalled, “with little room for experimentation.” He relied on the ingenuity of the glassblowers on the Venetian island of Murano to merge the form and brilliance of his design into “one single experience.” According to Casper Vissers, the company’s chief executive, recreating those techniques in China, where the lamp is now produced, was challenging. “It took two years, to be very honest, to get exactly right,” he said.
The reissued version introduces LED technology but otherwise leaves the design unchanged.
Established & Sons is showing at the Salone del Mobile from Tuesday through April 26 in Pavilion 24, Stand D03-D05; establishedandsons.com. — RIMA SUQI
Modern Mastery, Restored
This year, the Alcova design fair returns to the dormant and overgrown Baggio Military Hospital complex, built in 1931, alongside a second venue opening to the public for the first time: the 1939 Villa Pestarini, designed by the master Rationalist architect Franco Albini.
Within Villa Pestarini, the work of one of Albini’s collaborators is also finding new life. Luisa Castiglioni was a prominent architect in the 1960s, though her work has faded into obscurity. She built a trio of modernist villas in a fishing village on the coast of Liguria, where the era’s great intellectuals — including the book publisher Giulio Einaudi and the writers Italo Calvino and Cesare Pavese — spent holidays. In each of those houses, every furnishing, lamp and detail was custom designed by the architect.
Today, the three villas — Castiglioni’s “houses as manifestos,” as her granddaughter Maddalena Scarzella, herself an architect, described them — are known as Boccamonte. With her architect partner, Matteo Petrucci, Ms. Scarzella has restored Boccamonte as a group of vacation rentals, attracting a new generation of cultural figures. At Alcova, in an exhibition called “Houses in Progress,” the couple is presenting a table and trestle from Castiglioni’s archives rendered in iroko wood, plus a pair of lamps inspired by her designs.
“Architecture, for my grandmother’s generation, was political, a way to express their ethics, she always told me,” Ms. Scarzella said. Castiglioni’s rigor, geometric functionality and integration into the Mediterannean landscape reflected a desire for harmony between the inhabitant, house and surroundings. “She was one of just a handful of women in the field then, but architecture was her mission.”
“Houses in Progress” can be seen at Alcova Monday through April 26 at Villa Pestarini, 2/4 Via Mogadiscio, Milan; alcova.xyz. — LAURA RYSMAN
Memories in a (Giant) Bottle
Wafting from Andrea Santamarina’s trio of giant ceramic perfume bottles are memories of classic fragrances. Titled “Decadence,” the project, according to Ms. Santamarina, a Madrid-based designer and food art historian, “proposes a redefinition of luxury, not as something based on appearance or mass production, but as something rooted in time, craftsmanship and cultural memory.”
“Decadence” came about when a fragrance collector approached Ms. Santamarina to execute a series inspired by perfume bottles. It was not a commission she would have normally accepted. Her practice, she said, is devoted to reviving Mediterranean ceramics traditions, not in making full-on decorative objects, especially those identified with extreme privilege. But the collector was a family friend. The challenge was to meet the commission with “pieces with cultural and conceptual depth.”
She modeled the vessels digitally; sent them to a ceramics center in Valencia, Spain, where they were built from clay slabs; and finished them in Madrid with a crackled, eroded surface inspired by Venetian facades. The vessels are functional — the metal-edged stoppers double as vases that can hold a small bouquet, and the bases accommodate bundles of decorative branches. In this way, Ms Santamarina said, she retained the floral underpinning of scent in the absence of actual perfume.
“Decadence” will be shown from Tuesday through April 26 at the Rossana Orlandi design gallery, 14 Via Matteo Bandello, Milan; rossanaorlandi.com, santamarinastudio.com. — RIMA SUQI
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