Inside Magis: a Venetian design laboratory

Some companies chase trends. Magis, founded in 1976 by Eugenio Perazza near Venice, has spent almost five decades doing something steadier: taking serious industrial manufacturing — die-cast metal, air-moulded polymer, real engineering — and handing it to the best designers in the world.

It is a deceptively simple formula, and a demanding one. It asks the factory to be as ambitious as the designer, and it has produced a catalogue with almost no filler in it.

A roll-call of icons

The roll-call is extraordinary. Jasper Morrison's Bottle rack entered MoMA and the V&A in 1994. Stefano Giovannoni's Bombo became one of the most copied stools on earth. Konstantin Grcic, the Bouroullecs, Thomas Heatherwick, Naoto Fukasawa and Marc Newson have all made icons here.

Six Compasso d'Oro, close to a hundred awards, and more than 35 museum collections.

What unites such different designers is the house's insistence that manufacturing is not a constraint on an idea but the thing that makes it real. The engineering is never hidden; it is the point.

The proof on the shelf

The evidence is on the awards shelf: six ADI Compasso d'Oro — the oldest and most authoritative design prize — across Trioli, Steelwood, Spun, Plato and Costume, plus a Lifetime Achievement award for Eugenio Perazza in 2020.

Add close to a hundred awards in total and more than 35 museum collections, and Magis stops looking like a furniture brand and starts looking like a design institution that happens to run a factory.

Values, pointed forward

The values keep evolving. Since the early 2000s Magis has worked to end what it calls 'the dictatorship of plastic', moving toward recyclable, non-toxic materials and a circular approach summed up in a single line — a good product should last.

Read the full house profile, then read the pieces: almost fifty years of treating industry as a creative discipline, not a cost centre.