NOTHING IS ORIGINAL
How Patricia Urquiola borrows from everything
In Patricia Urquiola's Milan studio there was once a Vico Magistretti chair wearing a beaded seat cover, the kind you'd find in a taxi. Most designers would have taken it straight off. Urquiola loved it: "the beautiful chair and the trashy taxi cover on it, like a dress or a scarf."
The refined next to the everyday. You'll find that pairing in almost everything she makes.
A lesson from Castiglioni
Urquiola was born in Oviedo, in northern Spain, in 1961. She started architecture in Madrid, then moved to Milan and graduated from the Politecnico di Milano under Achille Castiglioni, one of the best-known names in Italian design. She went on to become his assistant lecturer, and one of his lessons stuck with her:
"Nothing is original. It all comes from somewhere else, capito?"
Castiglioni found his references in metal and machinery. Urquiola looked elsewhere. "Me, I look for analogies from the female," she said.
Not so gentle
Milan design in the 1990s was a male-dominated world. Urquiola worked alongside Vico Magistretti at De Padova, then ran the design team at Lissoni Associati. "On the surface I was a nice girl doing her homework," she said, "but actually, I was not so gentle."
Her break came around 1999, at a meeting a mutual friend set up with Patrizia Moroso a few months before Milan's Salone del Mobile. It was meant to be relaxed. Urquiola turned up with a model of a sofa. "We had all our products worked out. I wasn't looking for anything," Moroso remembers, "but when I saw this girl and that object, I thought it would be a pity to lose something like that, so we had to make it."
Moroso never says what the object was, but the Lowland sofa, which Moroso launched in 2000, is the likely candidate.
In 2001, at 39, she opened her own studio. Asked about the risk, she shrugged: "I didn't really have anything to lose at that point."
The attitude stayed, and these days it's aimed at the companies she designs for. She doesn't hand over a drawing and leave. She pushes manufacturers to change how they make things. At Andreu World, a chair family went from plastic to recycled plastic, then to bioplastic, because she kept asking. "I argue always a lot," she said. "I argue always for the thing I believe." Looking back on the projects that changed how a company thinks, she put it plainly: "I'm not so gentle working. I say it in a nice way."
Borrowing as a method
Twenty-five years on, the borrowing hasn't stopped. Manet's picnic painting, Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, became Night & Day, a sofa system for Molteni&C with its own tables, lamps and storage. "When I think of cold sitting rooms," she said, "I always wonder how I can get my déjeuner sur l'herbe in there." A 1970s ashtray became a table for B&B Italia. Crochet became rugs for Paola Lenti.
The picnic is more than a reference. Asked about her ideal meal, she named the same Manet painting. On a 2024 trip to Melbourne she took a salad, a plate and a blanket into the Royal Botanic Gardens. "Possibly for me this is the first and best room."
Still looking
She borrows from film too. Wim Wenders' Until the End of the World ends somewhere in the middle of Australia, and it's the reason she first came here, looking for that desert. She never found it, because it was never really one place. "I keep coming back to find it."
Nothing is timeless, either
If Urquiola is suspicious of originality, she's even more suspicious of "timeless". "Timeless, for me, is a word I protect myself from," she said. She'd rather keep ideas moving: "I only like manifestos that are open to being progressive."
She put it more plainly to Vogue Living in 2024: "When people say I am doing this project that is timeless, it is not a valid way to approach work. Your answer has to be connected with the time you are in."
It's an odd stance for the art director of Cassina, the company that makes Le Corbusier's furniture, and she knows it. "I'm art director of a company in Italy that has a lot of timeless pieces," she said, "and I don't know why they want me there."
What she cares about instead is the material. "I'm not thinking about permanence," she said. "I'm thinking more about how materials can be interesting." A material, to her, "is always connected to many other values. It tells us a lot of stories. It's not neutral."
From tents to Pantaya
Pantaya, her lighting collaboration with Pablo and Haworth, starts from the same habit. The references are high-performance tents and athletic wear. The result is a single piece of 3D-knitted mesh, made from 100% recycled polyester and stretched over a slim aluminium frame. The light sits inside, so it glows softly through the knit.
Textile is home ground for her. "I'm a big lover of textile," she says, because a textile can always open "a window to something else".
Pantaya also follows a material thread she's been pulling for years. In 2016 she designed screens for Haworth made entirely from one material, recycled polyester, so they could be pulled apart and recycled at the end of their life. Pantaya takes that idea, knits it and lights it.
Pantaya is a finalist in Interior Design Magazine's 2026 Best of Year Awards. It comes as a pendant in two sizes and as a wall sconce, in Roest, Sand, Olive and Graphite.
