THE DESIGNS OF A SERIOUS MAN

Hot property of European furniture manufacturers and two-time winner of the Italian Compasso d'Oro design award, Antonio Citterio is still largely unknown in the UK. Not for long. He's coming our way, says Lucas Hollweg

Milanese architect Antonio Citterio is among the brighter stars of European furniture design. Not a rising star, but a hot-burning supernova. Over the last two decades, his prolific output has made him a key player at the annual Milan furniture fair, the world showcase for contemporary design. His work, which has twice scooped Italy's prestigious Compasso d'Oro design prize, is elegantly modern and restrained - pared-down tables, clean-line sofas and sleekly styled storage units that blend state-of-the-art technology with comfort and radical good looks. He is hot property among Europe's most progressive furniture manufacturers. And yet, curiously, Citterio's name is virtually unknown in Britain outside architecture and design circles.

Contemporary furniture has a tragically low profile in this country. While goings-on in the fashion world consistently succeed in grabbing headlines, and the pronouncements of figures such as Richard Rogers or Norman Foster focus the public gaze on developments in architecture, our traditionalist leanings have meant that, for the most part, the work of contemporary furniture designers has never received the recognition it deserves.

But Citterio's time in Britain may finally have come. His furniture, with its minimalist blend of high-energy materials and user-friendliness, is increasingly appropriate for a British furniture market in which modern design is at last entering the mainstream. "He is a designer of note," says Andrew Purves, owner of design shop Purves & Purves, which this month stages a retrospective exhibition of Citterio's furniture - the first in a planned series of annual shows focusing on the work of contemporary designers. "He has a handwriting that is very recognisable: it's very clean, the most modern of modern and it has been consistent over the last 20 years."

In some ways Citterio lacks the street cred of many other design figures - as an architect he is more likely to design factories, private homes and corporate headquarters than the sort of projects that attract international media attention; as a designer, he focuses his technical ability on hospital furniture, public seating units and industrial lighting just as much as on the domestic market. "Everyone has picked up on designers like Philippe Starck because of the way they promote themselves," says Andrew Purves. "Starck tends to get himself photographed sitting on his chairs or looking up his lamps. Citterio's work is too serious for all that frivolity."

Yet it is this very seriousness that gives him his edge. Citterio is a pragmatist: he looks at the furniture people need and the ways in which they use it, then creates new, immaculately engineered versions of it that are geared towards improving the comfort and efficiency of people's homes, rather than simply pandering to an elitist design market. He prefers talking about the demands of production or the cost effectiveness of materials to discussions of aesthetics. But his designs combine an awareness of practical concerns with a fundamentally human appeal.

"Every product has an emotional starting point," he says. "My work is about trying to rationalise my initial emotional response to each project."

This rationalisation results in furniture that is as usable and good- looking as it is inventive. His award-winning Mobil drawer system and Tris range of stacking tables (both designed for the Italian manufacturer Kartell) are both soberly linear and curiously cheeky, their sleek, steel frames contrasted with frosted plastic components in a range of retina- searing colours.

While the use of industrial materials inevitably invites comparisons with the chromed-up offering of high-tech, this is a label with which Citterio himself is uncomfortable. "I believe in technology as an instrument, not as a formal result," he says. "In most high-tech there is a mystification of technology, a technological look without any technological substance." Technology is central to his work, yet he does not use newness for newness sake. His sofas and armchairs make use of traditional upholstery that ages gracefully - leather, fabric, fake suede, even rattan - and his recent Minni chair comes in a range of variants that includes fabric covers and pale beech wood legs alongside plastic and anodised aluminium.

Citterio's involvement with furniture design began early. The son of a cabinetmaker, he studied architecture at Milan Polytechnic, a training he immediately applied to industrial product design rather than building. He only returned to architecture 10 years ago, teaming up with his wife, the Californian-born architect Terry Dwan, in a successful partnership that recently won its first contract in Britain; the design of a new Habitat store in Kingston-upon-Thames.

Throughout his career he has distanced himself from theorising and intellectual debate. In the Seventies and Eighties, while many of his contemporaries were wrangling over the new stylistic currents stirred up by postmodernism, Citterio allied himself to a more modernist traditional, studying the work of pre-war rationalist designers in his native Italy and the post- war American designer Charles Eames. Eames and his circle - whose experimentation with manufacturing technology in the Fifties and Sixties produced some of the most timelessly modern furniture of the post-war years - have had a lasting effect on the way Citterio thinks and works. He describes his 1980 Diesis sofa as "a homage to Eames." More recent pieces for the manufacturer B&B Italia include the Harry sofa, a tribute to Eames' colleague Harry Bertoia, and the Florence chair, named after the influential designer Florence Knoll.

From this American modernist tradition, Citterio has also inherited a commercial realism in which the partnership between design and industry is of central importance. According to Rowan Moore, editor of design magazine, Blueprint, Citterio's strength is as a maker. "Whereas some designers are just about styling things, he understands how things work and are put together," he says. "He's neither one of the people who puts funny colours and shapes on things, nor is he a technofile who makes things look as slick and functional as possible."

This careful avoidance of fashion or fad gives Citterio's work a broad- based appeal that is absent from the work of designers with more conspicuous trademarks. "What is my trademark? Maybe I don't have one," he says. "I never want to be recognised by my work through exaggerated forms or unexpected materials. I am happy when someone discovers one of my products in his home without knowing that it is mine." He is critical of what he sees as the all-style-no-content approach to design that emerged in the Eighties. In an interview with Italian design journalist Gino Finizio he states: "The kind of overdesigned homes that are filled with designer objects I can only describe as kitsch... a decorative vision of the home as a place for living in."

The importance to Citterio of designing real objects for real homes is one reason perhaps why his work has never turned stale, despite a career that has so far produced sofas and too many chairs, tables and storage systems to count. His furniture might sometimes appear somewhat anonymous - as Rowan Moore puts it: "Whereas a bad Philippe Starck is trashy and silly, a bad Citterio is just a bit uninteresting." But then he is not interested in design as a projection of the designer's personality, but as an exercise in all-round perfection. In designing furniture that works he also designs furniture that is inconspiciously beautiful. He has, strangely, made a trademark of understatement. !