Pedrali

About

Pedrali S.p.A. is an Italian furniture manufacturer based in Mornico al Serio, in the province of Bergamo, that produces chairs, stools, tables, soft seating, complements and lighting for contract and residential interiors, and was founded in 1963. The company began as a craft workshop opened by Mario Pedrali in Palazzolo sull'Oglio, in the province of Brescia, where he produced wrought iron seating for outdoor use and developed much of the machinery he needed himself. From the 1970s the business moved toward industrial production for the contract market and began working with Italian and international architects and designers. Mario Pedrali's children, Monica and Giuseppe, joined the company in 1987 and were made partners in the 1990s; both now serve as chief executives, while their father holds the position of honorary president, and the business remains in family hands. The headquarters and main plant are at Mornico al Serio, where the Fili d'Erba automated warehouse, designed by Cino Zucchi Architetti and opened in 2016, rises 29 metres and holds 16,880 pallets of finished and semi-finished goods. A second plant, the wood division, has operated since 2005 at Manzano in the province of Udine, within the Friuli-Venezia Giulia chair district. In 2017 Mario Pedrali received the Imprenditore Olivettiano prize from the Associazione Archivio Storico Olivetti, and in 2023 the Milanese practice Park Associati completed the Pedrali Collaborative Space, a 560-square-metre office extension at the Mornico al Serio site. Pedrali develops its collections with Italian and international design studios rather than an in-house team, engineering the results for series production in its own factories. The company describes its output as entirely made in Italy, with metal, plastics and technopolymer, wood and plywood, and upholstery all worked at the two plants; at Manzano, chair components are built up from layered oak, ash and walnut and finished with water-based coatings made largely from plant-derived resins. Its certifications include ISO 9001 for quality, ISO 14001 for environmental management, ISO 45001 for occupational health and safety, FSC chain-of-custody certification for timber under code C114358, Greenguard for low emissions and UNI EN ISO 14064-1:2019 for corporate carbon footprint accounting. From 2020 the company introduced chairs moulded from fully recycled polypropylene, half of it post-consumer waste and half industrial waste, in a neutral grey. The catalogue is organised into four areas: hospitality, workspaces and corporate, outdoor, and residential. New collections are shown each year at the Salone del Mobile in Milan, where the company first exhibited in 1988. Among the products most associated with the company is Frida, a chair designed by Odo Fioravanti in 2008 and awarded the ADI Compasso d'Oro in 2011, which sets a thin moulded plywood shell over a slim solid oak frame. Nolita, developed in the mid-2010s by the studio CMP Design, formed by Michele Cazzaniga, Simone Mandelli and Antonio Pagliarulo, is a family of outdoor seats built from powder-coated steel tube with seats and backs formed of steel rod, a line the company relates directly to the metal garden chairs its founder made in 1963. Babila, also by Odo Fioravanti, is a chair family that pairs a technopolymer or upholstered shell with a die-cast aluminium frame and solid ash legs. The lighting range includes Giravolta, a rechargeable LED lamp by Alberto Basaglia and Natalia Rota Nodari whose rotating diffuser disc and base disc are joined by an extruded aluminium arch that also serves as a handle. The furniture is specified for hospitality settings such as restaurants, bars and hotels, for offices and corporate workspaces, for educational and public buildings and for private homes, with the outdoor collections used on terraces and in gardens. Products reach buyers through the brand's official website and its dealer network, alongside contract distributors and specifiers. Pedrali is a long-established Italian manufacturer of contract and residential seating, tables and lighting, run by the second generation of its founding family and producing at two plants in northern Italy.