The design duo Paola Vella and Ellen Bernhardt have long looked to architecture as inspiration for their studio Bernhardt & Vella’s elegant furnishings. They’ve now made the connection explicit in a new project with another pair of dynamos—photographers Lea Anouchinsky and Alberto Carlo Macchi—that situates their work in some of Milan’s most exceptional entryways.
“The project came out of a desire to tell a story connecting some of the most identitary products we’ve created over the years,” Vella and Bernhardt tell Surface, “with some of our architectural and aesthetic reference points.” And so Enrico Zanoni’s 1889 palazzo Casa Zanoni, in Corso Monforte, becomes in these photographs an art nouveau home in which Bernhardt & Vella’s Snake sofa for Rugiano seems to affectionately slither around the studio’s Crema Marfil marble table Scalea, made for Arflex.
A second setting, this time an entryway in Maggiolina, juxtaposes their cipollino marble Rock table for Rugiano, and a softly undulating Rio armchair for Calligaris, with a vibrant installation of warm wood paneling. “The dialogue between the products and entrance halls is very much evident in the last palazzo as well,” they say. The 1920s palazzo boasts rhomboidal motifs across ceilings and walls. “They create a continuum with the Origami bath collection designed for ex.t,” they say—ample evidence that in design as in collaborations, more is so often more.
