Welcome to Azucena

Azucena overview

Named after Azucena, the gypsy in the Italian opera Il Trovatore, the architects created this brand to bring together a number of collections to furnish buildings they had designed. At the same time they saw an opportunity to produce individual pieces as part of their series of furniture collections. This resulted in a range of iconic pieces - in particular the “Catilina” chair - recognisable for marrying different but very refined materials, reworked into traditional stylistic forms.

B&B Italia acquired the historic brand, intending to preserve it as part of Italy’s rich heritage, and it is being relaunched in 2018 with a series of "modern classics" designed by the architect Luigi Caccia Dominioni from the late 1940s onwards.

The collection includes chairs, sofas, tables and lamps that symbolise ‘made in Italy’ design and that return today as a showcase of style and quality.

Luigi Caccia Dominioni

From an aristocratic family, Caccia Dominioni cut a maverick figure and did not belong to any particular school of architecture. Whether designing a mansion or a lamp, a stately home or an apartment, a convent or a supermarket he dextrously moved between his projects.

He was a quintessential Milanese (as he liked to define himself) and he expressed his ideas with precision often including an element of surprise in his work: industriousness that embraced change, a high regard for manual workmanship giving impetus for innovative solutions. He never deliberately created iconic pieces, a trademark or logo; on the contrary he constantly reinvented his ideas finding ingenious solutions and giving them an unexpected twist. He liked to describe himself as “Baroque” yet many of his objects are so essential in their nature they border on minimalist. How is this possible you may well ask.

The leitmotif running through his work is not so much its style as the rigorous architectural approach adopted in his projects, whether large or small in scale. He used to say that "an apartment is a micro city" and those inhabiting it move around "mostly twisting and turning like water flowing down a river". And this explains why nature’s bends and curves gracefully converge with the architect’s straight lines in some of his most famous designs such as the Catilina chair, the Fascia Specchiata table, the Toro series and the Cavalletto table.

Caccia Dominioni’s objects are timeless and it’s hard not to fall in love with them. They are a repository of history, stories and ideas that only reveal themselves over time. This explains why he always said his objects should be "contemplated and used". This is why he always enjoyed such sophisticated patronage, and was loved by fellow architects and designers who gradually assimilated his ideas bringing them to the attention of a far wider public.