Kartell: blooming collaboration with Liberty

Italian design house Kartell recently teamed up with British fabric house Liberty to reimagine its beloved H.H.H chair. Now available in several floral iterations, the pretty collection adds a pleasing vibrancy to any indoor or outdoor space.

We chatted to Kartell’s marketing and retail director Lorenza Luti about the collab and collection.  “It always comes together by a relationship,” says Lorenza Luti, commenting on the origins of the brand’s collaboration with Liberty. 

A third-generation to work within the company, which her grandfather, Giulio Castelli, founded in 1949, 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.

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.”

The Kartell x Liberty edition is available in six Liberty fabrics and four versions created using a new high-tech industrial printing process called “graphic impression”.

Kartell is locally available at True Design. Stockists of the finest authentic designs, True Design represents several premium international brands in South Africa.

“Our brands are a true reflection of success, each with their own rich history, pioneering the trends of design and product technologies,” notes True Design.

The company has showrooms in Johannesburg and Cape Town.