Italian architect Antonio Citterio reflects on his enduring collaboration with Maxalto and how far the furniture brand has come since its early beginnings
A vision of a family’s elegant Parisian apartment, with new furnishings to suit their evolving needs—this is the key image that has stuck with Italian architect Antonio Citterio throughout the three decades he has designed products for Italian furniture brand Maxalto. “This Parisian apartment has stayed in our [minds]; we always photographed the collection in the same home for 25 years,” shares Citterio, who is also the brand’s longtime artistic director.
The sister label of furniture giant B&B Italia, Maxalto was launched in the mid-seventies. In 1995, Giorgio Busnelli took over the reins of the company from Piero Busnelli, his father and the founder of B&B Italia. In that same year, Giorgio enlisted Citterio to relaunch Maxalto with a new vision that has endured since then; in Singapore and Malaysia, the brand is available exclusively at Space Furniture.
Don’t miss: How this Italian architect is driven to tell stories through furniture design
Citterio describes the process of designing the collections to be almost “film-like”. “You imagine a family living in that space, you see the needs that they have, and you write a sort-of script by ‘writing’ the product,” he says. “The idea for Maxalto was to create a collection for enclosed spaces, imagined with a certain middle-class rituality. It’s a rituality that’s about inviting people [to the home] for lunch or for dinner; it’s about understanding good manners.”
The collections are thus sized to suit rooms in apartments of various styles and scales, while conveying a sense of timelessness that makes the inhabitants feel proud to show their home to their guests. Here, Citterio elaborates on the concept of the new Maxalto collections.
In case you missed it: Sustainability Is Not An Ideology—You Have To Do It, Says Architect Antonio Citterio
