Stefano Pilati and Pinto furniture collaboration

To most, Stefano Pilati is a man of considerable taste; he has worked with some of the world’s most legendary fashion houses including Prada, Ermenegildo Zegna, and Yves Saint Laurent. However last summer, the Italian designer explored a new creative avenue in his collaboration with the French design firm, Pinto.

The capsule collection includes an oversize sofa and a sculptural bronze chair. The company’s new owner and co-artistic director, Fahad Hariri, was instrumental in this important collaboration. Courtesy of Stir Pad, Hariri was quoted as saying, “For me, working together creates a relationship and an exchange. It is not simply bringing Stefano’s ideas into the Pinto universe, but rather transforming the Pinto universe thanks to Stefano.”

This is Pilati’s first venture into furniture design; however his fashion design’s familiar silhouettes proved instrumental with the draping and outlines portrayed in the new collection. The synergies between fashion design and furniture were quite helpful also. Pilati further concurs, “Upholstery, as a craft, is something a fashion designer can understand with a certain familiarity.”

Pilati says that the collaboration was all about the right time coinciding with the right people coming together. Mutual friends put the two creatives together and the development came about organically. Pilati told Forbes, “The chance to learn and master a practice, at every level in my experience helps my creative processes to be applied wherever I need to.”

The Pinto chair was cast in bronze… it is more a work of art than a functional furniture piece. Inspiration for the piece came from the furniture at the designer’s Sicily home, an 18th-century villa. Moving from Berlin to the less urban locale during Covid, Pilati found that his furniture was simply too small for the villa’s massive dimensions. As such, he put a carpet on the side of the sofa and a chair to create more mass. Even though it was simple and rigid, the result was effective… and sculptural.

In 2020, when Pilati brought his idea to Pinto, Hariri said, “I found that wrapping gesture so beautiful that I wanted to immortalize it with these two pieces.”

The couch is made from a sand-colored cotton, linen, viscose, and silk blend that is slightly easier to produce than the chair that is essential made from a circular woven water-hyacinth rug over a rattan armchair. At home in Sicily, natural materials like straw, bamboo, and rattan are common and appear relatively simple to use. However when Pilati began working with the materials, and his idea cemented in his mind, it was quite different… the material needed to act more sculptural because of the curves. Pilati said, “that was pretty exciting, because it was something that I haven’t seen before.”

The oversized sofa has a beechwood structure and a solid oak base that is topped with a high resilience foam padding of different densities that are strapped onto serpentine coil springs. The form resembles origami folds that stay closed thanks to the buttons that remain hidden in the couch.

Complementing each other, Hariri told Stir Pad, “The perfection and the precision of Stefano’s gestures were so natural and simple in appearance, but are the result of an expert eye and a demanding work on proportions, the throwing, the draping, etc.”

In turn, Pilati said about Pilati’s legacy, “I guess my style in decorating houses is how I am used to dressing up. However, I am familiar with the practice and enjoy it as much. Pinto is a fantastic “wardrobe” of beautiful designs.” Hopefully, this will evolve to more than just a capsule collection!