TITLE: GENERATIONAL RESILIENCE

PRODUCT: METZ&CO LOUNGE CHAIR

SEPTEMBER 29, 2025

Designed in 1942 for the Amsterdam department store Metz&Co, the armchair carries the story of its making, and its delay. Under occupation, production required membership in the Kultuurkamer; Rietveld refused, and the design remained a drawing and a prototype. That refusal gives the chair its first dimension: a work defined as much by conviction as by form. The preserved working drawings would carry it across decades, allowing production three-quarters of a century later.

Metz&Co had already been Rietveld’s stage. In 1932 the store asked him to crown its roof with a dome, a clear pavilion where European modernism entered Amsterdam, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, later Poul Kjærholm. The armchair belongs to that continuum: a sentence in the language of De Stijl, where line and plane find equilibrium and comfort is resolved through structure rather than surplus.

Its base is an assembly of thin slats in solid oak or American walnut, locked by dovetail joints that read like visible syntax. Above, a seat open to many textiles; a stitched-on cushion in felt or leather, edged with a frank feston stitch. Nothing is concealed. Every junction explains itself. Revived from original sketches and prototypes, the Metz&Co armchair returns to the living body of Rietveld’s work, alongside the Red Blue, Berlin, Steltman, and the Schröder House, showing how precision and principle travel through time. What history postponed now enters daily use: a chair at the intersection of ethics, craft, and clarity.

TITLE: GROUND UP

PRODUCT: CLUB 44 DINING TABLE

SEPTEMBER 22, 2025

Conceived in 1957 for the cultural club of La Chaux de Fonds, the Club 44 Table was Angelo Mangiarotti’s first collaboration with Bruno Morassutti. Agapecasa now brings this rare design into production, allowing it to finally take its place within the Mangiarotti Collection. More than a piece of furniture, it stands as a manifesto of the architect’s philosophy, where construction is not hidden but revealed, where beauty arises from the precise accord of form and material. In this early work, the themes that would guide Mangiarotti’s long career are already present: an ethical approach to making, a poetics of assembly, and the conviction that true elegance resides in the logic of structure.

The table is composed with a clarity that borders on the sculptural. Three distinct elements meet in balance and dialogue. The concrete base, heavy and grounding, carries the dignity of permanence. The steel structure, disciplined and refined, recalls the spirit of Mies van der Rohe. Above it rests the top, offered in wood or glass, square or round, elliptical or rectangular, its lightness completing the ensemble. Each material is treated with respect, each role defined, yet together they form more than a sum of parts. Club 44 is the opening chapter to a lineage that would later unfold in works such as the Eros and Incas tables, tracing a path of inquiry into how form, matter, and ethics might be reconciled through design.

In its return to production, the Club 44 Table becomes both an object of use and a reminder of values. Mangiarotti believed that correctness in practice, whether in architecture or in the smallest detail, was inseparable from beauty. His work shows that function need not oppose poetry, and that rigor can coexist with grace. Today, this table speaks again with quiet clarity: design, at its most enduring, is not invention for its own sake, but the patient expression of truth, of balance, and of respect for the materials that shape our lives.

TITLE: ESSENTIAL EXTRACTION

PRODUCT: PALLA LOUNGE CHAIR

SEPTEMBER 15, 2025

The Palla swivel lounge chair, first unveiled by Claudio Salocchi at the Salone del Mobile in 1969, was born from the creative intensity of a decade defined by radical experimentation. Starting from the volume of a sphere, Salocchi decomposed its form into a chair and ottoman that fit together in dialogue, inviting new ways of sitting, relaxing, and sharing space. It was a deliberate move away from the conventions of the armchair, expressing the search for freedom and informality that shaped Italian design in the late 1960s.

Over fifty years later, Acerbis reintroduces Palla in 2025 as part of its Remasters collection. The design is preserved in its original identity, but adapted for contemporary living: offered in both fixed and swivel versions, with updated padding and refined comfort. Its construction combines a wooden frame with polyurethane foam and a base in graphite-coated steel or polished chrome, remaining faithful to Salocchi’s architectural precision. The result is a piece that continues to embody the radical spirit of its era while seamlessly inhabiting today’s interiors.

For Salocchi, an architect and designer who moved fluidly between urban planning, interiors, and product design, Palla was not simply a chair but a manifesto of possibility. Its return underscores his role in shaping Italian design history: an independent voice whose experiments with form and function anticipated many of the themes that define living today. Through the Remasters collection, Palla speaks again, bridging past radicalism with present needs.