Cappellini

About

Cappellini is an Italian design furniture company founded in 1946 in Carugo, a town in the Como area of Lombardy, in northern Italy. It began as a small family woodworking workshop established by Enrico Cappellini. Over the following decades the firm moved from artisanal production toward contemporary design, a shift associated above all with Enrico's son, the architect and designer Giulio Cappellini, who took an active role in the company and steered it toward the international contemporary furniture market. The company is based in Lombardy, with its current headquarters, the Cappellini Hub, located in Lentate sul Seveso. Its early decades were rooted in the Brianza furniture-making district between Como, Monza and Milan, an area historically associated with Italian cabinetmaking and contemporary Italian furniture production. Cappellini is known for operating as a design-led "research" brand rather than a single-style manufacturer. Its catalogue brings together work from many international designers, and the company has a recorded history of identifying and producing the early work of figures who later became widely recognised. Designers associated with the brand include Jasper Morrison, Tom Dixon, Marc Newson, Marcel Wanders, the Bouroullec brothers and the Japanese designer Shiro Kuramata, among others. This editor-style model, in which a furniture house commissions and curates pieces from independent designers, is a defining characteristic of the company's catalogue of design chairs and other furniture. Several Cappellini products are held in museum collections. The Proust armchair, designed by Alessandro Mendini in 1978, is a heavily ornamented armchair with a hand-painted, pointillist-style surface pattern, and it has become one of the company's most frequently referenced pieces. The Thinking Man's Chair, designed by Jasper Morrison in 1986 and brought into Cappellini production in 1988, is a painted lounge chair built from tubular steel and flat metal bars, with an open, exposed structure. The S-Chair, designed by Tom Dixon in 1991, is a sinuous S-shaped chair that is part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The Knotted Chair, designed by Marcel Wanders in 1996, is made from a knotted carbon and aramid-fibre cord stiffened with epoxy resin, and it is also held in major design collections. In terms of ownership, Cappellini is no longer an independent family company. It joined the Poltrona Frau Group in 2004. In 2014 the Poltrona Frau Group, including Cappellini, was acquired by the United States office and contract furniture manufacturer Haworth, Inc. Today the brand is managed within Haworth's Lifestyle Design grouping, alongside other Italian design houses such as Poltrona Frau and Cassina, while continuing to be produced in Italy. Commercially, Cappellini sits at the high end of the contemporary Italian furniture market. Its products are sold through a network of authorised retailers, design galleries and showrooms internationally, as well as through the company's own stores, rather than through mass-market channels. The catalogue spans seating, tables, storage and accessories aimed primarily at residential interiors, although individual pieces also appear in contract, retail and exhibition settings. For buyers and researchers, Cappellini is most often described in terms of Italian design furniture and contemporary Italian furniture, with a particular reputation for design chairs created in collaboration with independent designers. The combination of author-designed pieces and a consistent presence in international design museums places the brand within the collectible and premium segment of the market. Its long-running practice of working with a rotating roster of designers, rather than a single in-house style, is central to how the company is positioned.