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Calligaris: designing the modern home since 1923
Calligaris is Italian in a specific way. Not a design studio in Milan, but a family company in Manzano, a small town in Friuli where making furniture was what most people did for a living. Three generations have run it since 1923, when Antonio Calligaris began in a workshop with a single chair. A hundred years later the company still makes what the town made: things you sit on and things you sit at.
What a chair town teaches
Manzano became known as a chair district because so much of its work went into one object. That kind of concentration produces knowledge that is hard to acquire any other way, about proportion, about comfort, about how a joint holds up after years of being pushed back from a table. You can read it in a single model. The Oleandro chair takes its name from the oleander, its backrest frame tapering and flattening toward the tip in a line drawn from the plant's long narrow leaves. The seat and back are generously padded, and the wooden structure comes in finishes including canaletto walnut. A detail borrowed from a garden, resolved as Italian furniture.
Tables that change size
The same attention went into tables, and specifically into extension mechanisms the company patented rather than borrowed. It matters more than it sounds. A room that seats six most weeks and ten in December is a common problem, and an extendable dining table built properly is the answer. The Yoroi table takes its reference from samurai armour, with a central base marked by vertical grooves and wooden inserts under a Calacatta Paonazzo marble top in a pearl beige finish, offered in three sizes. The round Abrey table is quieter, on a round section base in solid ash, and gives back floor space in a smaller room.
A hundred years of the same question
What holds the collection together is a habit of looking outward for a starting point and then building patiently around it. Calligaris finds a reference, develops a family from it, and offers it in enough finishes to work in almost any room. That is what a century spent asking how people sit and gather actually produces. Come see the collection at Casavogue in Montreal.