Mario Bellini is an Italian architect and designer. His career as a product and furniture designer began in 1963 and from 1963 – 1991 he was chief design consultant for Olivetti.
For many years he designed furnishing products and systems for B&B Italia and Cassina with one his most popular designs the Camaleonda still as desirable.
You may not know the designers name or the name of sofa but you have no doubt seen the design. The ever-popular Camaleonda sofa sits in the living rooms of global tastemakers from artist Daniel Ashram to life style expert Athena Calderone.
When Marc Jacobs opened his Madison Avenue pop-up in 2018 he placed a green corduroy version in the center and Stella McCartney chose a pink version to install into her bond street flagship.
The Camaleonda is beautiful and bulbous and easily sits along harder sculptural elements. Designed as a modular seating system the Camaleonda has no set shape allowing it to be used as an individual 90*90cm module, a straight sofa, an L-shape or something more abstract, positioned to suit the owners preference.
To describe the sofa, Bellini once told Architectural Digest “I crossed two words: camaleonte, or chameleon, an extraordinary animal capable of adapting to its environment, and onda, or wave.’’
The Camalonda is defiantly having a moment; B&B re-released the official design for the first time since 1979.
Header image via One Kings Lane
