Photo: Galleriao.net
Whether it’s fashion or furniture, it takes a few unconventional elements for me to really react to a design. I have seen quite a few in my time, so it’s less often that I get so excited about something that I get on a mission to have it. But so it was with the Lina armchair from the Campana Brothers.
Photo: Galleriao.net
Part of their 2013 Brazilian Baroque collection, which so beautifully fuses new world and old world elements, this gilded mohair-wool chair greatly appealed to me. With this capsule, Brazilian designers Fernando and Humberto Campana reimagined ornate baroque decoration from the 17th and 18th centuries, creating a series of furniture from jumbles of metal emblems and figures. The most alluring part is how the metal keys, leaves and animals were welded together to create elements such as the legs of stone tables and furry chairs.
Big in the design world, the Campana Brothers started to work together in the eighties, when they teamed up to make furniture made of ordinary materials including scrap and waste products such as cardboard, rope, cloth and wood scraps, plastic tubes and aluminium wire. From 1997, some of their products began to be produced and sold in Italy. Their pieces are opulent without looking dated and antiquey. They are beautiful, but still have a strong sense of being design-led.
I have the silver Lina chair in my home in Miami, where it acts as the hero piece in the lounge.
The Campana Brothers’ Brazilian Baroque collection is still on show at the David Gill Gallery in London