Italian furniture brand Magis was founded in 1976 by Eugenio Perazza, and has grown to become an international design giant. The brand constantly generates design products with high technological sophistication, and leads the way in adding novel twists to domestic design.
Since 2004, Magis has been working closely with design duo the Bouroullec brothers. This collaboration between Magis and Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec has led to a number of furniture collections including the award-winning Steelwood range and the most recent Officina collection.
The Officina Collection
Officina table featured
The Officina collection consists of many types of tables – dining, low, bar and console – and features hammered wrought iron legs and tabletops in a variety of materials including wood, sheet metal and glass. The collection, which was presented during Salone Del Mobile 2014, utilises one of the oldest production techniques to create structural furniture of sophistication, refinement and harmony.
The Bouroullec brothers combined the “ancient fabrication process” of hammering wrought iron with a new visual language, giving shape to a system of legs with a “newly made geometric shape to hold up tabletops of different sizes and nature”.
The Theca Collection
The Theca sideboard combines an aluminium body and sliding doors with wooden shelves that bolt to the punched aluminium sides. The aluminium comes in a black or natural finish and the shelves are in either cherry or ash.
For this collection, the Bouroullec brothers employed the manufacturing process of metal stamping – typically an industrial process – to turn a thin sheet of metal into a rigid structural piece for domestic use.
Steelwood
The award-winning Steelwood range of chairs, tables, stools, coat stand and shelving system is the result of marrying two conventional materials: steel and wood. The Bouroullec brothers designed the collection with the intention of preserving the illusion of timeworn delicacy. The furniture pieces can be adapted for use in different environments, including both casual and elegant settings.
Through extensive technological research, the steel-forming process has been refined to provide each furniture piece with its intricate form and perfect curvature. Skilled metalworkers in Italy use a series of complex mechanical procedures to gradually shear and shape the metal pieces. This is then paired with legs and seat milled out of solid wood.
Pila
The Pila chair is a lightweight minimalist chair in natural or stained ash. When conceptualising the design, the Bouroullec duo intended to create a chair that used only the minimum amount of materials and assembly pieces. This gave birth to Pila, a chair so light it seemed to “float in space”.
The plywood seat and back parts of the chair are supported by four very thin, solid wood sticks. These sticks are held together by an aluminium structure that is almost invisible.
