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2 couples that will make you fall in love with design
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Estimated reading time
4 Minutes

2 couples that will make you fall in love with design

A couple is a very strange thing. It’s made up of two people, yet it’s not plural. It doesn’t come from merging two people together, but rather from their coexistence.

A couple is a unit: firm, functional, operational. When it’s well centred and irresistibly magnetic, everything else revolves around it – including several fantastic design projects.

Kartell: Giulio and Anna Castelli Ferrieri

She’s one of the first women in Italy to hold a degree in Architecture and he’s a chemical engineer, who became an entrepreneur with a thing for plastics: this is how Kartell was born.

A blueprint for love, without a doubt: Giulio and Anna Castelli Ferrieri are husband and wife, as well as being business partners. In 1949, Giulio graduated from chemical engineering and Anna had been working for an architecture practice in Milan for the previous three years, Kartell was founded too, a firm entirely devoted to manufacturing plastic objects.

Pure innovation, almost visionary, and ahead of the Sixties.

This partnership was to make its debut a few years later, in 1967, at the Salone del Mobile in Milan, no less. It’s here that the Componibili by Kartell, designed by Anna, were presented to the design industry. They were to revolutionise the idea of what a chest of drawers should look like and end up in homes and museums all over the world.

Anna and Giulio’s story is about two Italian creative professionals, deeply rooted in the second half of the twentieth century with its cultural momentum. He helped establish the association for industrial design (ADI), as well as acting as Kartell’s president until his death in 2006, only a few months before Anna’s own death. She had been an architect, professor at the Polytechnic of Milan and for a short period of time, ADI president too.

Anna and Giulio CastelliAnna and Giulio Castelli

Componibile metal 2-piece storage container
Componibile metal 3-piece storage container
Componibile 4-piece storage container
Componibile 3-piece storage container

Studio Job: Job Smeets and Nynke Tynagel

These two features are enough to make you fall in love with Studio Job: the fact that Job Smeets and Nynke Tynagel describe each other as soulmates and both share an incredible Sixties style. Luckily, this passion is reinforced by their bold and extremely colourful design projects.

Founded in 2000, Studio Job brings together two wildly creative people, who both graduated from the Design Academy in Eindhoven. The two have found a secret formula in order to reach the right balance, taking the design industry by storm but in perfect harmony, designing pieces for Bulgari, Qeeboo, Seletti, Rizzoli and L’Oreal.

Their style is actually as loud and eclectic as it is astonishingly coherent. And extremely well received, to the tune of two or three awards per year: their projects are on display in over ten different museum all around the world. The couple’s success reached its climax in 2016 with a solo show at the MoMA in New York, entitled Studio Job MAD HOUSE.

And even if recently Job and Nynke aren’t a couple any more, the creative and professional balance they reached and maintained throughout their time with Studio Job was a striking example of how

Each of the parts is of equal importance as it lends itself to the creation of the totality, or the universal artwork
Nynke Tynagel

Job Smeets and Nynke TynagelJob Smeets and Nynke Tynagel

Industry Collection chair
Jobby The Cat lamp
Industry Collection table 70cm Diam.
Mexico outdoor stool
Killer umbrella stand
Flash Metal Led floor lamp
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