Know Your Sofas: The Camaleonda Sofa

Let's face it, there were a ton of super-cool sofas designed and manufactured by super-cool furniture designers in the 1960s and 1970s. The Togo sofa by Michel Ducaroy (here), the Terrazza sofa by de Sede and Ubald Klug (here), the Élysée Sofa by Pierre Paulin (here), and the Serpentine sofa by Vladimir Kagan (here). And to this illustrious list in our series Know Your Sofas, I am delighted to add the equally super-cool Camaleonda sofa by Mario Bellini.

Born in 1935, Mario Bellini's amazingly varied and prolific design career started in 1963. Among many other thihngs he was, and you might want to sit down for this, chief product designer at Olvetti from 1963 to 1991, designed furnishings for B&B Italia and Cassina and Natuzzi, hi-fi systems, headphones and electric organs for Yamaha, lamps for Artemide, Erco and Flos, office furniture for Vitra, and was an auto deisgn consultant for Renault. And he has twenty-five of his designs in the permanent design collection of the New York MoMA. Wow. As of this writing, Bellini is 87 and still designing at his studio Mario Bellini Architects.

But back to his Camaleonda sofa...designed for B&B Italia in 1970.  In a 2020 interview with Architectural Digest, Bellini said, "I crossed two words: camaleonte, or chameleon, an extraordinary animal capable of adapting to its environment, and onda, or wave." This portmanteau is a perfect word for modular seating that can be arranged in many different ways to suit a specific room or environment. Here it is in an original B&B Italia advertisement in 1971.

Photo: Bruno Falchi and Liderno Salvador

The sofa is held together with an ingenious system of cables and hooks. And I love how the upholstery ends up looking like it is draped rather than tightly tacked down.

Here it is in the Malibu home of Beastie Boy Mike D. 

Photo by Trevor Tondro

And here it is in the amazing Brooklyn townhouse of Athena Calderone as featured in architectural Digest in 2018.

Photo by Gieves Anderson

Although the sofa went out of production in 1979 and originals auction off for more than a pretty penny, B&B Italia, the original manufacturers, have brought it back, now featuring recycled and recyclable materials.

Happy designing!

History of Furniture: The Conversation Pit

For this installment, let's look at something that is not so much an actual piece of individual furniture as much as it is a structure: The Conversation Pit.

Although sunken seating has roots far back in history, particularly in Asian countries, interior design lore suggests that the first real conversation pit as we know it today was created by Bruce Goff, an American architect, for a home he designed in 1927. Conversation pits became something of a signature in his home designs but it wasn't until the 1950s that the idea caught fire and spread, showing up in the 60s, 70s, even into the 80s!

Perhaps one of the best known examples of a conversation pit is in the Miller House, the mid-century masterpiece designed by Eero Saarinen with interiors by the incomparable Alexander Girard. It was Girard who suggested the conversation pit so as not to clutter the space with furniture pieces that would have impeded the view and interrupted the lines of Saarinen's architecture.

Another spectacular example of a conversation pit, on a grand scale, is another Saarinen design: the TWA Terminal at JFK which is now the fabulously retro TWA Hotel!

Conversation pits could be found in ordinary residential designs as well!

Eventually, like any element from pretty much any era, conversation pits started to look dated and fell out of favor. But word is they are making a comeback in interior architecture and design. Here is a current, superb example by architect Craig Steely who embedded a marvelous sunken pit into the concrete foundation of a home in the hills of the Santa Cruz Mountains. Steely says the pit "is filled with 144 sq. ft. of B&B Italia’s 'Tufty time' sofa components." In deep purple. Delightful.

Happy designing!

Know Your Sofas: The Terrazza

I love the sofa we are examining for this installation of Know Your Sofas.

Made in 1973 for leather furniture manufacturer de Sede, the designer Ubald Klug conceived of it as a heap of sand that had been sat upon. But Klug's onetime collaborator Willi Glaeser said, "He had the idea to produce a kind of mountain. In the Alps the cows walk around leaving horizontal terraces. You see these patterns in this sofa." Hence the nickname for this sofa: "The Terrazza," or terrace...to me, they have always resembled isobars. But the manufacturer of the sofa refers to it by its product name: the DS-1025.

Interior design by Claude Missir

Interior design by Kelly Wearstler

Interior design by Martyn Lawrence Bullard

Interior design by Yves Behar

It has an irresistible 1970s glamour about it. Mick Jagger was photographed lounging on a Terrazza, conjuring up images of Studio54-esque lollying and orgying. And like most famous pieces of furniture, it has taken its turn on the silver screen. It shows up in the 1976 sci-fi film "Logan's Run" with Michael York and Jenny Agutter. (Previously featured in film and television: the Elda chair and the Ribbon chair.)

While originals sell for steep prices at auction, you can buy a new Terrazza from de Sede in a wide variety of colors.

Happy designing!