Antonio Citterio, the man who reinvented the sofa

When Antonio Citterio and his American-born wife Terry Dwan made their home in Milan in the 1980s, the city had only recently emerged from the protracted trauma of the Red Brigade years. For more than a decade, political violence, police sirens, street fights and demonstrations accompanied by long lines of blue-grey buses with armoured windows full of bored carabinieri waiting for action were the inescapable backdrop to daily routine throughout Italy.

The crisis, however, had not stood in the way of Citterio’s rapid success. Born in 1950 in Meda, the medieval town at the heart of the Brianza furniture manufacturing district, the first chair he designed went on sale at the La Rinascente department store in 1972 while he was still a student.

By the time Citterio and Dwan — who both trained as architects — took on the top floor of what was then a faded 18th-century building in Milan’s historic centre, he was well on the way to becoming the most successful furniture designer of his generation.

He has changed not just the way that furniture looks but also how it is used. He put the kitchen at the centre of the home, rather than treating it as a functional adjunct, gave it the stainless-steel professional look of a restaurant and popularised the kitchen island. He also has a good claim to having reinvented the sofa, turning it from the awkward junior member of the three-piece suite into an object on which to relax, eat, sleep, talk and work.

Citterio’s home has been a test bed for his ideas. “My ideal is to live with as few things as possible, but to select them with obsessive care,” he says.

Forty years ago, Citterio could afford to live in the Brera area, he says, because the middle classes had abandoned Milan’s city centre in favour of suburban developments, such as the ones that Silvio Berlusconi built near Linate airport. He bought an attic at the front of one of the classical palazzos, with ochre-coloured walls and green-shuttered windows. When they were built, their ground floors were used for storage and to stable horses. The affluent lived on the piano nobile, while their servants climbed endless stairs to the top floors.

“When we first moved in, there was still a lot of pollution coming from the tourist coaches parked below our windows,” says Citterio, 72. He has since installed a lift, opened the rafters to create a double-height living area and put in a terraced roof garden.

Over the years, the apartment has reflected the shifts in Citterio’s work. When he bought it, he was designing a series of projects for Esprit, the fashion chain from California founded by Doug Tompkins, one of a series of charismatic clients that shaped Citterio’s career. “We used the same metal staircase at home that we designed for the store in Amsterdam,” he says. The stairs have gone now, but a bridge that spans the living space made from the same materials remains.

Working on the architecture of the flat prompted Citterio to think beyond the design of individual pieces of furniture and to look at how the way people were living was changing. On his first trip to New York, back when artists were able to acquire whole floors of industrial buildings in which to live and work, he discovered the “loft”. In this setting, the traditional way of backing furniture up against the wall, like hostages in their own home, would look ridiculous.

The result was Sity, for furniture company B&B Italia, launched in 1986, the first in a series of sofas. It was made up of a family of pieces — some curved, others rectangular — that could be put together in a variety of ways without drawing attention to itself, more like an architectural background than furniture.

He noticed something else about loft living, too. Out of necessity, the kitchen also had to be part of the living room. He took the idea home with him.

“Terry and I moved the kitchen to the upper floor [where the main living area is],” he says. “She wanted to be able to cook and to see everybody at the same time. So, we made an island kitchen and a table, so she can cook and talk.”

The layout became the model for Citterio’s design for Arclinea’s range of kitchens. Frank Lloyd Wright designed what was perhaps the first island kitchen in the 1930s, but he only did it once. Citterio has designed multiple versions for various Italian companies that have sold in hundreds of thousands and, if you count the copies, in millions.

As Citterio prospered, the family had the means to buy a second, and then a third, apartment in the same building when their children were born in the 1990s. “As the family grew, everybody got their own space, with their own bathroom, bedroom and a studio,” says Citterio. “The shared space for everybody turned out to be the kitchen.”

Dwan now has her own architectural studio on the ground floor, overlooking the garden courtyard. In the early days, the children could walk to school. Today, their son is studying in New York and their daughter lives in the US. They also own a house in the mountains in St Moritz and a weekend place on the coast near Portofino.

“Neither of our children followed us into architecture but they work in related fields; our daughter works in the field of sustainability, our son is doing a masters in real estate,” says Citterio. “It’s no longer possible to open your own studio at the age of 20 as I did.”

In contrast to a stagnating Rome, Milan has experienced something of a building boom in recent decades — and quite a lot of it designed by ACPV, the architectural practice Citterio began with Patricia Viel in 2000, now one of Italy’s largest.

At the heart of Citterio’s Brera neighbourhood sits the Accademia di Belle Arti, the art school founded when the city was still under Austrian rule nearly 250 years ago. The adjoining art museum, established by Napoleon, has an exceptional display of masterpieces going back to Piero della Francesca.

Back in the 1970s, during the so-called “years of lead” — when some wealthy Italians had given up on going to smart restaurants, stopped driving expensive cars and dressed down for fear of being robbed or kidnapped — a lot of Milanese designers decided that making work that would sell well was no longer relevant. They embarked on a series of radical design experiments, with results somewhere between the shocking and the unusable.

Perhaps as a result, Citterio opted for a more sober approach. He had spent a lot of the early days of his career in a workshop in Meda learning how to make a sofa with his own hands, an experience he compares to fine tailoring. “This was a time when a lot of furniture looked like sculpture. I said, let’s do something really calm, and really normal.” In fact, normal is still one of his favourite words.

Citterio has become one of the most prolific designers of furniture, aimed at every conceivable market and price range. When Pope John Paul II visited Croatia in the 1990s, an architect from Zagreb took the chrome steel and white leather seat and back from a Citterio office chair and transplanted it into a bronze-embellished timber carcass to serve as the pontiff’s throne.

Citterio’s Visavis office chair, a tubular steel cantilever update of a Bauhaus classic, has sold more than 1.3mn copies. At the other end of the scale, the fashion house Hermès offers one of Citterio’s sofas for the price of a mid-market saloon — it, at least, seats its occupants in more comfort and considerably more style.

Citterio’s aesthetic, though thoroughly steeped in the modern Italian tradition, has a profound respect for the work of US designers Charles and Ray Eames. He met them in 1968 while he was still a student. For Citterio, it was an almost religious experience: “like hearing the Madonna speak”, he says.

When one of his clients offered him as a wedding present the chance of a weekend stay in the famous steel and glass house the Eameses designed for themselves in California, Citterio was too much in awe to accept. “Frankly, I was a bit scared.”

He had already worked hard to learn the lessons of their approach. “I had a good teacher at Milan polytechnic who suggested that I dismantle an Eames chair to see how it was made and to understand the thinking behind it.”

Favourite thing

Citterio’s apartment is full of his own work. But there are notable exceptions: a chandelier designed by the godfather of Milanese postwar architecture, Luigi Caccia Dominioni; a table by Achille Castiglioni; and a Philippe Starck lamp. “I do buy things, an interesting looking chair when I find one, but really I collect art more than I do design.”

Citterio’s favourite thing is a steel wall installation by Donald Judd that appears to float in the room. Citterio named a sofa he designed 20 years ago “Groundpiece” after one of Judd’s works. Citterio once took his son to Judd’s design museum in Marfa, Texas. “When I tried to take my son to museums before that, there would be big fights,” he says. “But, after seeing Marfa, he started to love art. He even went back on his own.”

It remains the key to Citterio’s approach to the design process. He believes that unless a designer has worked out how to make a piece, they can’t really claim to have designed it. What has changed since the days of the Eameses is the issue of sustainability, and how furniture can be recycled. “You start at the end of its life [ . . . ] and think about how to take an object apart, how to use as little new material as possible and how to make reuse of it. It’s an entirely different approach from the way that design used to work.”

Citterio may have reinvented the sofa. He has certainly reshaped a lot of offices, bedrooms, bathrooms and kitchens. But it could also be said that he has made a substantial impact on shifting tastes. “Contemporary design was a tiny part of the market when I started, no more than 10 per cent, while all the rest was traditional,” he says. “Now contemporary design is the market.”

But Citterio is carefully modest about his role. “If there was anything revolutionary about the work we did on the sofa, it was that we realised that it was going to change before most people did,” he says. “As designers we are a part of the evolution of a product. We see what is happening in the market. Sometimes we can have a vision of something new. But the designer is a part of the culture [and] there are many others around the table — success for a designer is based on the people you get to work with.”

Deyan Sudjic is director emeritus of the Design Museum in London

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