Osvaldo Borsani, Varedo

Osvaldo Borsani learned furniture from the inside. He and his twin brother Fulgenzio were born in 1911 in Varedo, a small town in the Brianza north of Milan, and grew up in the workshop their father Gaetano ran there - the Atelier di Varedo, later known as Arredamento Borsani Varedo. The boys learned the trade among the cabinetmakers, carvers, upholsterers and polishers who made furniture for Milan's better apartments. By the time Osvaldo went to study architecture at the Politecnico di Milano, he already knew how a drawer should run, how a veneer was laid, and what a craftsman needed from a drawing.

He did not wait for his degree to make a mark. In 1933, still a student, he designed the Casa Minima for the Milan Triennale, a compact modern house that won a silver medal. He graduated in 1937 and brought what he had learned straight back to Varedo, where he began to redefine what the family atelier could be.

The work of the next fifteen years is Borsani at his most theatrical, and it is the work collectors pursue hardest now. He treated a room the way an architect treats a building, designing everything from the panelling to the cabinets to the lighting, and he brought artists into the process as collaborators rather than decorators. Lucio Fontana - later famous for slashing his canvases - made ceilings, fireplaces and sculptural details for Borsani interiors. Arnaldo Pomodoro, Agenore Fabbri and Aligi Sassu contributed reliefs, handles, panels and painted surfaces. A Borsani cabinet of the 1940s or early 1950s might be faced in figured rosewood, fluted from top to bottom, fitted inside with mirror and glass, and set on legs with the slight outward splay of a dancer's stance. It is cabinetmaking that wants to be looked at.

The house he built for his own family in Varedo, between 1943 and 1945, holds the period together. Villa Borsani is a modern house of clean lines and generous windows, furnished entirely by the atelier, with Fontana's work in its rooms. It remains in the family, and has become something of a pilgrimage for anyone serious about Italian design.

Then, in 1953, he changed direction. With Fulgenzio, Osvaldo founded Tecno, a company devoted not to bespoke interiors but to furniture that could be engineered and produced in series. It might look like a betrayal of the atelier. It was closer to the opposite. Borsani had spent twenty years learning exactly how furniture was made by hand, and he brought that knowledge to the question of how it might be made by machine without losing its intelligence.

The first results were extraordinary. The D70 sofa of 1954 has a seat and back that pivot on a central bar, so that it can lie flat as a daybed or fold upright into something slim and compact. The P40 lounge chair of 1955 may be the most adjustable armchair ever made: backrest, seat and footrest can be set in hundreds of combinations, and the arms are made of flexible rubber that gives under the hand. Both are still in production. Both look, seventy years on, entirely modern.

Tecno went on to furnish offices, banks, auditoriums and airports, and by the 1970s the name was more closely tied to the working world than to the home. Borsani continued to lead the company until his death in 1985. In 2018 the Triennale di Milano gave him a major retrospective, curated by Norman Foster with Borsani's grandson Tommaso Fantoni - a reminder of how much ground one designer had covered.

That breadth is what makes him so interesting. Most designers of his generation began on one side of the line between craft and industry and stayed there. Borsani crossed it, and carried the habits of the workshop with him. His mass-produced chairs think like a cabinetmaker: every joint considered, every movement resolved. His hand-made cabinets think like an architect. The two halves of his career are not opposites. They are the same mind, working with different tools.

There is also something particular about where he came from. The Brianza has always been a place of families - workshops passed down, skills held in a household rather than a school. Borsani's career is that inheritance carried as far as it would go: from a father's bench in Varedo to the factory floor, without ever quite forgetting the bench.

The pieces from the Varedo years remain the rarest. Made in small numbers, often for a single client and a single room, they were never meant to circulate. When one does, it carries everything at once - the father's workshop, the son's architecture, the artist's hand - in a single piece of rosewood.

Osvaldo Borsani pieces from The Leopard's vintage collection are in store in Moss Vale and online, including this 1950s Varedo cocktail cabinet by Borsani.

Photo: Paolo Monti, Servizio fotografico (Italia, 1954), Fondo Paolo Monti, BEIC, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.