Cassina's Sweet Refuge

In a redesign of the Cassina headquarters, Patricia Urquiola honors the company’s Modernist legacy while investing in unexpected and revelatory design flourishes.

- Samuel Medina

“When you reach 90,” says architect Patricia Urquiola of Cassina, the Italian furniture company whose artistic direction she oversees, “you can enter a second youth.” It’s a poetic and counterintuitive thought—that with advanced age come “many possibilities for finding new solutions and new joys.”

Founded in 1927, the brand boasts 600 pieces in its archives from architects and designers such as Le Corbusier, Gio Ponti, and Franco Albini. Cassina’s back catalog is effulgent with the symbols of Modernist iconography, but this fact shouldn’t be confused with piety. Since she joined the company in 2015, at its Brianza headquarters, 15 miles north of Milan, Urquiola has made gentle incursions into the Cassina identity. Thus far, her influence has been felt in colorful reinterpretations of classics like the LC2—Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret, and Charlotte Perriand’s marvelously supple, down-cushioned ode to the machineà-habiter. The design’s monochromatic purism has given way to pastels, eclectically combined in ways at first incongruous and then pleasant.