Magis goes public: design that works for the crowd

A chair earns a different kind of respect when a hundred strangers a day sit in it. Contract — the world of hotels, restaurants and public spaces — is the hardest test furniture faces, and it is where Magis has quietly become a fixture.

The demands are unforgiving: pieces must stack, survive abuse, meet safety and fire ratings, and still look like design rather than equipment. Passing that test is its own kind of endorsement.

A travel diary of projects

The range reads like a travel diary. Déjà-vu chairs in a plant-powered restaurant on London's Regent Street. Piña and Milà across a five-star hotel carved out of a 1938 building in the centre of Rome. Mariolina in a Milan pizzeria. The whole Officina family, by the Bouroullecs, furnishing a spa hotel built into the Carpathian mountains.

Contract is the hardest test furniture faces — a hundred strangers a day.

The variety is the argument. A single house supplying a Roman five-star and a neighbourhood pizzeria with equal credibility is a house whose pieces work across the whole spectrum of public life.

Why it works at home too

What makes these pieces work for projects is exactly what makes them good at home: they stack, they take a knock, many carry an indoor/outdoor rating, and they arrive with the manufacturer's full specifications.

The contract test, in other words, is a domestic guarantee in disguise. A chair engineered for a hundred strangers a day will barely notice a family.

Already in Australia

There is even a Magis project in Sydney — XOPP, furnished with Milà and Sequoia — so the format already travels here. For an Australian operator that is the opportunity: original, specifiable design, supported locally.

Open the project pages to see how each one was put together — and how it might translate to a room here, whether that room seats one family or a hundred guests.