GamFratesi, in their own language

Stine Gam is Danish; Enrico Fratesi is Italian. Their studio, founded in Copenhagen, works in the space between those two design cultures — Danish restraint and craft on one side, Italian narrative and drama on the other.

GamFratesi has become GUBI's most recognisable contemporary voice precisely because it refuses to choose between those instincts, holding both in a single object.

The Beetle, and the logic of the shell

Nothing shows it better than the Beetle. Launched with GUBI in 2013, the chair takes its cues from the insect world — the shell, the sutures, the rigid outside and soft inside — and turns them into a dining chair now found in restaurants the world over.

Danish restraint, Italian narrative — held in one object.

The biology is not decoration. The hard-outside, soft-inside logic is what makes the Beetle both durable enough for contract use and comfortable enough for a long dinner — a narrative idea doing structural work.

A language across the collection

The partnership has since stretched across the collection: the slender, crossing legs of the TS tables, the Art-Deco geometry of the IOI mirror, and the reworked English roll-arm of the Flâneur sofa — each unmistakably theirs.

What ties them together is a habit of starting from a story — an insect, a period, a familiar archetype — and then editing it with Danish discipline until only the essential gesture remains.

Why it reads as timeless

Design that begins in narrative risks ageing as fast as the story that inspired it. GamFratesi avoids that trap through restraint: the drama is stated once, then quieted, so the object settles rather than shouts.

That is why a Beetle or a Flâneur already feels like part of the GUBI canon rather than a dated novelty — contemporary work made to the same test the house applies to its rediscovered classics.