Componibili - a design icon

‘Kartell Componibili – A Design Icon that is simple, useful and timeless..

The Componibili storage system produced by Kartell and designed by Anna Castelli Ferrieri, a Milanese architect and industrial designer who co-founded the legendary Kartell furniture brand alongside her husband. Ferrieri created the piece in the late 1960s using plastic. It was first displayed at Salone del Mobile (the famous Milan Furniture Fair) in 1967. It is exhibited in the permanent collections of the Modern Museum of Art in New York and the Center Georges Pompidou in Paris.

Anna Castelli Ferrieri was an Italian architect and designer, one of the first Italian women graduated in architecture and one of the few women in the design sector in those years. She is known for her collaboration with Kartell, a company founded by her husband in 1949 and a pioneer in Italy in research and production of everyday plastic objects.

The Componibili, initially called “mobili 4970/84”, were first presented in 1967 at the Salone del Mobile in Milan and reflect the idea of Anna Castelli Ferrieri of a design that should not only be beautiful but also functional. The Componibili fully reflect the design trends of the early 1960s, years of economic boom and full development of the industry. In these years, objects were designed to be not only beautiful but also functional in order to meet the needs of modern life. Industrialisation was increasingly applied also to the world of design, with the serial production process that also became an aesthetic reference. Plastic was the material that characterised these years under the motto “plastic is fantastic” (the trend will change towards the end of the 1960s with the arrival of the youth revolution, the hippy culture, the London cultural influences such as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and then in the 70s as a result of the oil crisis). Plastic objects in the early 1960s represented modernity and progress: they responded to the demands of serial production, flexibility, modularity, lightness.

The Componibili storage units were immediately appreciated for their functionality and modularity: the container elements can be superimposed without the help of screws or pins but thanks to a simple interlocking shape. They can be assembled freely in different compositions in terms of colour and number of shelves. The storage units have a sliding opening characterised by a hole instead of the handle. They were also the first injection-molded ABS plastic assembled components. View the full range here.