Kartell’s blooming collaboration with Liberty has us yearning for spring

Those yearning for the blossoms of spring simply need to pop by Stockholm’s Kartell flagship. The Italian design house has outfitted its displays with an explosion of blooms for Stockholm Design Week. The occasion? The brand’s collaboration with British fabric house Liberty. At the heart of the link-up are Kartell’s iconic H.H.H. (Her Highest Highness) chairs, reimagined in a handful of Liberty’s vibrant floral upholsteries and graphic impressions to bring a pleasing vibrancy to any indoor or outdoor space.

“It always comes together by a relationship,” says Lorenza Luti when I ask about the origins of the work with Liberty. The marketing and retail director at Kartell, Luti represents the third-generation to work within the company, which her grandfather, Giulio Castelli, founded in 1949 (her father, Claudio Luti, is the brand’s current CEO). As it turns out, one of Luti’s childhood friends just so happens to work at Liberty’s Italian office. “It’s not just a fabric that was applied, but we really worked with the creativity, digging in the archives and working with their team,” says Luti. Ultimately, the prints were based on hand-painted archival Liberty prints, both from the 1990s and from the 1930s.

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Imagined by French designer Philippe Starck for Kartell, the H.H.H. chair, with its high swooping back and elegant armrests, is stunning in its simplicity and intent, namely, to encourage those who interact with it to sit up straight. “It’s a fantastic chair,” says Luti. “You can really see the detail – we worked on it three years before launching it.”

Though Luti cut her teeth at another Italian family company, Zegna, she always knew she would eventually enter the family business. She started off on the shop floor in Milan 22 years ago before relocating to the store in Paris, eventually settling back at the Milan head office. But Kartell had a prominence in her life long before that. “I remember my grandparents, when they still worked and ran Kartell, every year we went to Salone del Mobile,” she says. In the courtyard behind the office, which boasts trees that blossom with flowers every spring, Luti would attend both company events and employee birthday parties.

As Luti puts it, Kartell is less about a particular style or aesthetic and more about an “identity”. “We have a strong identity based on creativity – we work with designers that are some of the best in the world,” she says. For Luti, Kartell is synonymous with innovation, both technologically – advanced industrial production means homes all over the world can boast pieces by Kartell – and in terms of materials (sustainability has been at the forefront of Kartell’s offering for the past decade, for instance, the brand's pieces created from discarded coffee pods). “My grandfather always told us to be really curious of what’s around you and work in the future,” she says. “Don’t do things because you have done them in the past.”