B&B Italia

B&B Italia began in 1966 in Novedrate, in Italy's Como province, when Piero Ambrogio Busnelli started a furniture venture with Cesare Cassina under the name C&B Italia and ten employees. Busnelli had identified an opportunity in cold-forming polyurethane molding, a technology not yet widely applied to furniture production, and used it to build upholstered pieces industrially rather than through traditional frame-and-stuffing methods. In 1973 Busnelli bought out Cassina's stake and renamed the company B&B. The Novedrate headquarters is itself a design landmark: a 1972 building designed by a young Renzo Piano together with Richard Rogers, several years before the pair's Centre Pompidou in Paris. B&B's design output produced three Compasso d'Oro award winners — Mario Bellini's Le Bambole armchair (1972), Studio Kairos's Sisamo wardrobe system (1983), and Antonio Citterio's Sity sofa (1987) — alongside Bellini's modular Camaleonda sofa, launched in 1970 and shown at MoMA's 1972 'Italy: The New Domestic Landscape' exhibition. Camaleonda's cable-and-hook modular construction let owners reconfigure or disassemble seating sections; the design went out of production in 1979 and was reissued in 2020 using recycled materials.