Enzo Mari’s Mariolina is an icon in the design world

The modernist silhouette of the subtly attractive Mariolina Chair is now available in a mono version at the popular homeware giant Magis.

Enzo Mari is considered to be one of the greatest exponents of Italian design and in-deed of world design. The creator of innumerable pieces that have become veritable icons, as well as an avant-garde academic, he loves archetypal shapes onto which he grafts his formulations, his talent, and his leaps into the future.

Mariolina is no exception. The image is only apparently a simple, minimal chair, but the attention to detail transforms a humble seat into an intelligent object: the slim legs and curved backrest are designed especially to provide comfort and easy posture, without compromising on the aesthetic and style of the chair.

When Enzo Mari designed Mariolina in 2002, it was a breath of fresh air in the world of chairs. It was not about new comfort, it was more about experience and emotions… Chairs are one of the basic furniture pieces but they aren‘t easy – they don‘t have the architectural structure of a table or the comfy indeterminacy of a sofa. They don‘t have the inflated dimensions of a bed or the magical possibilities of light.

Chairs are everywhere and they have to respond to an extraordinary variety of situations, needs, and tastes. We sit on it in offices, kitchens, schools, in dining rooms or in the garden – we spend more time in contact with chairs than with any other object and no other object has to withstand the shape, movements and different postures of our bodies.

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“The world was not designed for the rich,” Mari once said, because good design should be there for everyone. With this ambition, he revolutionized the design world and established a new understanding of the creation of products like Mariolina. It is a basic chair, but a manifestation of Mari’s design vision at the same time – simple, practical, long-lasting, and most importantly affordable.

Mariolina recalls the fifties-style but features a series of extra details. The legs in powder-coated steel tubes are in fact slimmer and more precise in section. The polypropylene seat and back are not screwed or riveted to the frame, but instead attached using a series of molded ribs that grip the metal frame on the rear of the seat and back. Mariolina is stackable up to 12 pieces.

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