Discover the world of Gae Aulenti, the pioneering Italian architect and designer whose visionary work reshaped modern living.
From landmark museum projects to cult-status furniture and lighting, Aulenti brought architectural rigour and poetic form into everyday interiors.
Her rare designs at Lumini Collections, including the sculptural “Tennis” bed for Gavina and the dynamic Sgarsul rocking chair for Poltronova, embody the bold curves, Space Age elegance and human warmth that define her legacy.
Explore how these original Italian pieces connect Byron Bay homes to the golden era of mid-century Italian design and Aulenti’s enduring creative spirit.
Gae Aulenti’s story is the story of modern Italian design itself: quietly radical, architecturally precise, and unafraid of bold character.
*Feature Image - A rare First Edition Giova Table Lamp by Gae Aulenti for Fontana Arte, 1960s
From Friuli to the heart of Italian modernism
Gaetana “Gae” Aulenti was born in 1927 in Palazzolo dello Stella, a small town in Friuli, far from the cosmopolitan Milan she would later help define.
After the war she moved to Milan and graduated in architecture from the Politecnico di Milano in 1953, joining a generation determined to rebuild Italy not only with concrete and steel, but with ideas.
In the 1950s and 60s she became part of the intellectual circle around the magazine Casabella-Continuità, first as a graphic designer and then as an editor, absorbing and shaping debates on how a modern Italy could honour its past without becoming nostalgic.
Her early work aligned with the Neoliberty movement, which resisted the cold language of strict rationalism and instead reintroduced history, decoration and memory into modern architecture and design.
A multidisciplinary force: architect, designer, scenographer
Aulenti never accepted the idea that an architect should work only on buildings. She designed architecture, interiors, furniture, museum layouts, theatre sets, even city squares, moving fluidly between scales while keeping the same sharp, human-centred eye.
Internationally, she is perhaps best known for transforming the disused Gare d’Orsay railway station in Paris into the Musée d’Orsay in the 1980s, turning an industrial shell into a luminous museum for 19th‑century art. Similar museum and cultural commissions followed in Venice (Palazzo Grassi), Barcelona, San Francisco, Naples and Tokyo, cementing her reputation as one of the most important architects of her generation.
Yet, alongside these large public works, she maintained a close relationship with industrial design.
In 1979 she became artistic director of FontanaArte, creating lighting and furniture that brought her architectural discipline into the intimacy of the home.
Her pieces for companies like Martinelli Luce, Artemide and Gavina showed the same approach: sculptural forms, clear structure, and an insistence that everyday objects can carry cultural weight.
Image 3 - "Patroclo" table lamp by Gae Aulenti for Artemide Milano. Part of Lumini private collection.
Icons for living: Aulenti’s furniture and lighting
Many people meet Aulenti not in a museum, but in a living room.
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The Pipistrello lamp (1965) for Martinelli Luce, with its telescopic steel stem and bat-like opal diffuser, is both playful and monumental, a functional sculpture that can shift height and presence within a space.
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For FontanaArte she designed pieces like the 1964 Giova table lamp (feature picture) and Tavolo con ruote (1980), a glass table that sits on industrial castors, elegantly collapsing the distance between workshop and salon.
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Across her furniture, glass, metal, leather and industrial components are combined in ways that feel at once mechanical and sensual, firmly grounded yet slightly otherworldly.
Image 3 - Gae Aulenti “Stringa” Seating Set for Poltronova, Italy 1962
These designs were never just about aesthetics; they were about how people move, lounge, read, talk and inhabit space. Her work consistently invites the body to relax, but the mind to stay alert.
Gae Aulenti at Lumini Collections
Within Lumini Collections, Aulenti’s presence is felt through rare, sculptural pieces that embody her Space Age sensitivity and her architectural understanding of volume and proportion.
The collection’s Gae Aulenti “Tennis” king-size bed for Gavina (Italy, 1972) is a prime example: a luxurious mid‑century leather bed defined by bold curves, a floating plinth base and a sense of quiet drama that anchors the entire room.
The Tennis bed mirrors many of the themes that run through Aulenti’s broader work.
Its low, horizontal stance echoes her architectural habit of working with strong, almost geological planes, while the softened edges and generous upholstery speak to her humanistic side.
It feels simultaneously futuristic and familiar, like a piece from a refined Space Age apartment that has aged into classic status rather than period cliché.
Alongside the Tennis bed, Lumini Collections also showcases an Italian Mid Century Modern Sgarsul rocking chair by Gae Aulenti for Poltronova, another work where structure and comfort are in deliberate tension.
Image 4 - Italian Mid Century Modern Sgarsul Rocking Chair by Gae Aulenti for Poltronova, 1960s
The Sgarsul uses sweeping curves and a dynamic profile to turn a simple act—rocking back and forth—into a visual performance, capturing the sense of movement that runs through so much of Aulenti’s design language.
Why Aulenti matters now
Aulenti passed away in Milan in 2012, the same year the city dedicated Piazza Gae Aulenti, a circular public square, to her legacy—a fitting monument for a designer who treated public space as a living room for the city.
Today, as interiors shift towards pieces that carry story, substance and sculptural presence, her work feels more relevant than ever.
The Aulenti pieces at Lumini Collections are not just collectible design; they are touchstones to a cultural moment when Italy reimagined itself through architecture and furniture.
To live with a Tennis bed or a Sgarsul chair is to bring that moment into the present: a home where modernity has memory, where comfort is architectural, and where every line carries the signature of one of Italy’s most independent design voices.