Osvaldo Borsani Cocktail Cabinet in Rosewood: Varedo, c.1950s

Osvaldo Borsani grew up among the cabinetmakers. His father Gaetano ran the family workshop in Varedo, a small Brianza town twenty kilometres north of Milan, and Osvaldo and his twin brother Fulgenzio learned the craft from inside it. By the time he graduated in architecture from the Politecnico di Milano in 1937, he had already been drawing furniture for the family firm for years. The work that followed - through the 1940s and into the 1950s, before he and Fulgenzio founded Tecno in 1953 - is Borsani at his most theatrical. Rosewood polished to a depth that catches the light. Brass details placed with restraint. Fluted facades, mirrored interiors, sculpted legs with the slight splay of a dancer's stance. He worked with artists - Lucio Fontana, Roberto Crippa, Adriano Spilimbergo - and treated furniture as a discipline closer to interior architecture than to cabinetry. The pieces from this period are recognisable on sight. They are also, increasingly, hard to find.

This cocktail cabinet is one of them. The form is in three movements: an upper bar compartment with locking doors, its interior mirrored and fitted with glass shelving; a central panel of vertical reeding, the wood worked into a fluted texture that runs the full height of the piece; and a lower bank of drawers in rosewood with neat brass pulls. The cabinet stands on tapered legs that splay slightly outward, the feet capped in brass. Open the upper doors and the interior reads as a small theatre - mirrored, lit by reflection, designed to make the bottles and glassware on its shelves the subject of the room.

In original condition. Polish to the surfaces consistent with age. Light marks throughout.

Dimensions: H 1.46m × W 1.79m × D 0.44m

Enquire about this piece via the form below.