Cassina’s iMaestri collection shines in Icon magazine editorial

The Cassina Store Milano transforms into a gallery of purposeful abstraction for Icon 108’s latest editorial conversation, where the Italian manufacturer’s most revered pieces engage in silent debate with contemporary craft. Photographer Paolo Zambaldi captures this exchange across a pale terrain of terrazzo and cream, where furnishings become protagonists rather than props.

Carlo Scarpa’s Cornaro sofa, drawn from Cassina’s iMaestri Collection, anchors the first image in deep teal velvet, its curved form both sensuous and architectural. The piece emerges from Scarpa’s 1964 design vocabulary, where geometry softens into invitation. Beside it, Linde Freya Tangelder’s Side Table I demonstrates fluid joinery in pale wood, its edges articulate and honest. Gerrit Rietveld’s Utrecht armchair, another iMaestri inheritance, sits nearby in cream upholstery, its spare rectangular frame holding fast to modernist principle.

In the second image, both pieces recur in conversation: the Utrecht armchair maintains its austere elegance, while a second sofa in neutral fabric offers counterpoint. The staging moves beyond product display into something more alive. Styled by Ilario Vilnius, the editorial dresses its subjects in contemporary tailoring, camel overshirts, pinstriped shirts, oversized dark coats, allowing the clothes and furniture to negotiate meaning together. Editor in Chief Andrea Tenerani’s concept treats this room as a space where design culture speaks directly to personal expression, where a sofa becomes not merely a place to sit but a surface upon which taste, era and intention are legible.

The store’s layout, orchestrated by Patricia Urquiola, provides the canvas for this visual argument. Pale curtains rise behind, architectural in their own right, while the geometric precision of the floor grounds everything in austere beauty. The editorial runs in Icon 108.

Imagery courtesy of Cassina (@cassinaofficial).