Next year marks the 70th birthday of Kartell, and the successful company founded by the Milanese chemist Giulio Castelli shows no signs of slowing down.
Since 1949, Kartell has been manufacturing plastic furniture for the home: a half-century history that counts over 8,000 products and countless collaborations with top-level artists and designers such as Joe Colombo and Philippe Starck.
In October, the Dutch Catawiki platform is hosting an auction dedicated to Italian design with an interesting catalogue containing many of the iconic creations made for Kartell by these two designers for Kartell.
Joe Colombo (1930-1971)
Joe Colombo started working for Kartell in 1963. Two years later, he created the first chair made in a single piece using injection-molded plastic. The product, known as "Universal No. 4860", constituted a true innovation in the design world both for technique and for the material with which it was produced, so much so that has exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.
One of Joe Colombo's passions was storage. In 1963 he designed a cylindrical container called ‘Combi-Center’ and a year later he created ‘Man-Woman Container’, the futuristic version of a 19th-century trunk. In 1970 he designed the ‘Boby’ ABS plastic machine with drawers and rotating shelves, which is still produced.
One of Colombo’s most iconic lamps is the ‘KD27’, made of ABS plastic and Plexiglas and known for its curvilinear shapes that the designer loved so much. Despite his short career (he was struck by a heart attack at just 41 years), Joe Colombo was a prolific industrial designer and quickly managed to create a series of innovative products in ABS plastic, PVC, polyethylene and glass fibre, material with which in 1963 he created the iconic ‘Elda’ armchair.
Find out how to register with the auction house here
Philippe Starck (b. 1949)
Aesthetics and functionality are the main features of Philippe Starck's designs. In 1996, the designer created the ‘Miss Trip’ chair for Kartell and since then has never stopped designing indoor and outdoor chairs.
The chair model ‘Masters’ was created by Philippe Starck in a powerful tribute to three designer chairs: ‘Series 7’ by Arne Jacobsen, the ‘Tulip Armchair’ by Eero Saarinen, and the ‘Eiffel Chair’ by Charles Eames. Starck’s design intertwines these silhouettes into a hybrid fusion of a light, practical and stackable chair.
Starck has produced chairs that have formed part of the history of design, such as the ‘Louis Ghost’ chair (even designed into a children's version called ‘Lou Lou Ghost’). The ‘Louis Ghost’ is the first chair in transparent plastic in the world that reinterprets the style of Louis XV in the XXI century.
‘Ero / S /’ is an oval, elegant and sophisticated armchair that envelops the person who sits in it in a warm embrace. It is said to be one of the most comfortable chairs designed by Philippe Starck for Kartell.
Starck’s ‘Dr. Glob’ model comes from the idea of collecting different materials to create a chair with a more rigid structure, but without losing sight of style. The plastic used gives the furniture a special texture, and makes it uniquely opaque and soft.