LE MURA XL

Mario Bellini has always been more than just a designer. In the Italian idiom he is a progettista, someone for whom boundaries of scale barely exist. From Gio Ponti’s dictum of “the spoon to the city” onward, Bellini and his contemporaries saw little difference between conceiving a chair or developing a masterplan.

Now pushing 90, Bellini is still hard to categorize. His firm’s architectural work stretches from major museums and airports to vast convention centers, while his exhibition designs — including his own 2017 landmark retrospective at the Triennale in Milan — confirm that he’s always known how to frame himself as both auteur and spectacle.

As a designer, he has ranged from communal concept cars to experiments in lighting and household electronics. And yet, sofas have proven to be the axis on which his reputation turns, with designs like the Amanta (1966), the Camaleonda (1970), and Le Bambole (1972) securing him a place in the pantheon of postwar Italian design. These pieces, born at a time when rival family firms were competing for ever greater feats of innovation, continue to exert an almost magnetic fascination: plump, louche, and improbably contemporary even half a century later.

That era’s entrepreneurial zeal is rarer today, but still survives at Tacchini, a family owned firm near Milan now under the direction of Giusi Tacchini. The daughter of founder Antonio Tacchini, she has managed the trick of combining the work of Italian design maestros — Umberto Riva, Gianfranco Frattini, Tobia Scarpa — with the newer generation — Faye Toogood, Michael Anastassiades, Formafantasma — into one coherent brand family, giving the company a presence that feels both contemporary and enduring. In 2022, Bellini joined this constellation with the reissue of his 1972 sofa Le Mura.

The piece, whose name translates as “the walls,” is a rigorously modular seating system, a set of upholstered blocks intended to suggest the permanence of Roman masonry while in fact being infinitely rearrangeable. In 2025, its latest iteration, Le Mura XL, is presented as the logical next step: the same modular fortress, only bigger, lower, loungier. “In Le Mura there’s a clear architectural echo: blocks like ashlars, a constructive rhythm that brings the logic of ancient masonry into the living room,” says Giusi Tacchini, who trained as an archaeologist before taking over the company.

Bellini, as usual, plays the pragmatist. “Some of the sofas I designed feel more contemporary now than when I originally designed them,” he says, with the bemused air of a man used to having the past catch up with him. Modularity, he adds, is the secret: the idea that one can rearrange a room repeatedly without ever buying anything new. If the original Le Mura suggested the utopian living rooms of the 1970s, its XL version feels tailored to the sprawl of contemporary domestic life: “Bigger, more informal, more generous — it’s a sofa designed for our present,” says Tacchini. Its blocks have grown with our expectations of comfort, a sofa that now doubles as both architecture and terrain.