Before setting foot into Kartell's 'Museo', in Noviglio, just outside of Milan, I'd assumed that the brand's archive would be the par for the course for this sort of thing — one room with a timeline of the business printed onto a wall, a few of its most iconic furniture designs on plinths. A brief introduction.
Instead, I found myself in a lofty space across several floors — a warren of paths that guides you from its starting point (once solely a manufacturer of ski straps for cars) to some of its most noteworthy contemporary projects — a collaboration for the 2023 Barbie film was a particularly engaging display.
In Milan, where furniture design is as serious a business as its fashion industry, endless coachloads of school children and design students come to see the archive, looking to learn from the past. "Through drawings, sketches, and models that reveal the thought processes behind historically significant products, as well as contemporary photographs, catalogues, and texts documenting the designers’ intentions and motivations, we can explore a place of conservation that also functions as a creative workshop," Lorenza Luti, the director general of the Kartell Museum tells me. "Here, materials from the past inspire new narratives and perspectives, linking the present to the future."
But, is there a value to the brand that goes beyond education? I'd argue that, in 2025, the cultural cachet of the archive has become mainstream. Whether in fashion or design, archival pieces, that might have once been just the domain of serious collectors, are the new signifiers of wealth. The flaunting of luxury goods is on a more global platform than ever, and with the wealthy able to buy into any new product relatively easily, no matter how limited edition its production run, its design with history and story that really begets the value of 'scarcity' as a commodity.
It's in a brand's best interest, then, to equate itself now more than ever with its own history, and the anecdotes that contextualize and humanize its designs.
On my visit to the Kartell Museo, I'm allowed access into the actual archive to look at original sketches from great Italian designers such as Joe Colombo — under supervision, of course. "In the archive, you'll find the prototypes, drawings, and design projects, some of which were never produced," Lorenza explains. "It’s a place where ideas, visions, and the technical and formal solutions behind Kartell’s most iconic objects are preserved."
For Kartell, which is known for its innovation with plastic as a material, it's a particularly technical history, littered with trial and error that, eventually, led to some of its best-known furniture and accessory designs, from the Componibili storage, designed at the end of the 1960s, to the Ghost chair, a relatively recent design classic from 2002. "It narrates the silent stories that the final, polished objects don’t always reveal," Lorenza adds.
The sketches, notes, and drawings are materials that Kartell has kept safe over the company's history, and are now being re-examined, including cataloguing the archives of Lorenza's grandmother, Anna Castelli Ferrieri, an architect and Design Director for Kartell.
It's not just Kartell who has turned the idea of the archive into a brand moment. MillerKnoll, for example, recently unveiled a new archive at its Michigan Design Yard headquarters, while for other brands it's not a new phenomenon — Vitra opened its Basel museum-archive back in 1989.
The design museum is a chance for a brand to take control over the narrative of its own story, as well as conserve its design history more sensitively. The archive, though looking to the past, is not a static state of being, and is staffed with archivists whose job it is to unearth the ideas and stories buried under the weight of time.
"The daily work involves a meticulous process of research and cataloguing, which is an ongoing effort, especially given the vast amount of material we manage, much of which is paper-based," Lorenza says.
The decorative back of the Masters Chair is inspired by the silhouettes of three iconic chair designs designs. These forms are even imprinted into the plastic on the base of the chair.
On the museum side of things, it's a different story. Kartell didn't necessarily keep an archive of all its products over time, and the brand's archivists are still actively seeking models from the Italian design brand's catalogue. Over lunch, Lorenza tells stories of collectors turning up at the museum's doors with vintage discoveries, as well as archivists scouring eBay and online auction sites for objects missing from, or exemplary additions to, the collection.
And, just as there are still designs to be found, there are still stories to be discovered. "While cataloguing materials related to Joe Colombo, we recently rediscovered a design for a chessboard he had conceived. We chose to bring it to life for the very first time as part of an exhibition dedicated to him, inaugurated this April in the courtyard of our museum," Lorenza tells me.
"Every prototype, drawing, and photograph is a seed that may one day grow into a new idea. Every rediscovered photograph, every object waiting to tell its story, every outdated model or sketch of a rejected product contributes to an ongoing dialogue between designers and the world around them, between creative minds and society at large."
Kartell don't do a lot of re-issues, but this table lamp for Joe Colombo received one this year, and feels particularly apt for the direction of modern design right now.
For Kartell, and for other brands, embracing the archive is an economical way to connect with their DNA, values, and legacy — and to create products with an instant history. After all, furniture companies don’t trade directly in the resale market; the incentive will always be to sell something new.
What surprised me, stepping into Kartell’s Museo, was how alive the past feels here — not static, but constantly reinterpreted. That may be the true role of the design archive today: not simply to preserve history, but to brand it, and in the process, to make yesterday’s ideas the currency of tomorrow’s luxury.
