Crafting A Legacy

A pioneer in the furniture industry, Italian manufacturer Cassina has one of the richest catalogues in design history, spanning over 90 years of creativity

Two heads are better than one is an adage that Cassina lives by. In just over nine decades, it boasts an enviable archive of iconic designs, a result of collaborations with design’s greatest minds including Le Corbusier, Charlotte Perriand, Frank Lloyd Wright, Ettore Sottsass and Vico Magistretti to name a few. Informed by a relentless pursuit of innovation, it’s not one to rest on its laurels. The Italian brand has also worked with the world’s top contemporary talent such as Jaime Hayón, Konstantin Grcic, Philippe Starck, and Patricia Urquiola, who has been Cassina’s art director since 2015. It’s not surprising that thumbing the pages of the company’s catalogue is like perusing a history book of 20th-century design.

FAMILY TIES

The Cassina story begins in 1927, when 18-year-old entrepreneur Cesare Cassina and his brother Umberto, who come from a family of carpenters from Meda (a city close to Milan in the Lombardy region – famed for its design manufacturing) founded the brand. Initially a small family workshop that processed wood for tables for the local market, Cesare introduced upholstery to the business.

Cassina came of age during Italy’s post-war Renaissance in the 1950s, launching industrial design during the country’s economic boom by shifting from hand craftsmanship to serial production. This consisted of identifying the commercial potential of a product by studying its compatibility with specific lifestyles and new ways of living, an approach that was made possible thanks to extensive studies on materials and technologies.