Reintroduce to designers, artisans and artists who have marked an era, a think tank voted in favour of the art design. A lab of ideas and freedom of thought where we can experience and find once again the need and the vital force that moves in all those signs that want to be non-conventional.

In Turin we were doing the history of design and we didn’t even know it……but we were having a lot of fun!
Like the last day of school, full of passion for the future and pride for the past. A desire to make music with shapes and materials.
The maturity of that time and these years of work and successful or failed attempts has refined our thinking.
We will not stop having fun. Promised.

Piero and Guido Gugliermetto

Grosso is a small town in Canavese, not far from Turin with a strong connotation of artisan furniture makers. Here the Gugliermetto family, consisting of four brothers, Francesco, Giuseppe, Guido and Piero, coined the acronym Mobilgufram, then changed to Multigufram and finally Gufram (Gugliermetto Fratelli Arredamenti Moderni, sold in 2004 to Poltrona Frau) and they have chosen to produce modern furniture, at the expense of furnishings in a classical style, putting his hand to a family tradition started by generations.

Since 1953, the four boys, just twenty years old, have been exposed for a “scandalous” showcase: their poltrona Ginetta is even coated with a red backrest and seat, black armrests, and lit by spotlights.

Since then, they had clear ideas. 1958 marks the first official release. The place is the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Turin, the occasion is an exhibition of Piedmontese artistic furniture. The Honorary Committee, convened for the occasion and formed by, among others, Felice Casorati, Valdo Fusi and Otto Maraini, has the task of judging. The Gugliermetto also have their stand: it has the number of twenty-five and the name of Francesco Gugliermetti – with the i not yet fallen – factory of sofas and armchairs.

Modern is the acceppted meaning that for Francesco, Giuseppe, Guido and Piero Gugliermetto are marking the passing of tradition through the use of materials with which it is possible to experience new forms and meanings. One of these is the Pirelli Sapsa foam rubber, used first in padded products.

The sixties will confirm the important breakthrough of the company, thanks also to the economic and productive strategy implemented through collaboration with the Turin avant-gardes…

The path marked by the Gugliermetto brothers engages in a historical and cultural context that, beyond national borders, was enriching the field of art with flashy messages of mass publicity, giving way to the triumphal entry of “goods” produced in the daily, through the evocative effect.

In this enviroment, cities such as Turin, home of the Faculty of Architecture, become each starting point for groups of artists-designers whose working systematically for the first time with small crafts-industrial companies, experiment and discover the expressive potential of materials like as expanded polyurethane, soft ductility, which lends itself to creating “new realities” through influences of shapes that change nature and assume a different and stronger meaning.

Gugliermentto in their long career have collaborated with some of the most important artists and authors of Italian design: Pietro Raimondi, Ugo Nespolo, Piero Gilardi, Strum with Piero Derossi, Giorgio Ceretti and Roberto Rosso, Studio 65 with Gianni Arnaudo, Franco Audrito, Nanà Sampaniotou, Ferruccio Tartaglia, Giancarlo Paci and other students, Franco Mello and Guido Drocco, Giorgio De Ferrari, Gino Bistagnino, Gianni Pettena, Roberto Lazzeroni, Angelo Cusimano, Joachim De Barros, De Pas, D’Urbino, Gaetano Pesce and many others.
The history of the company they founded is on all design books and known by any enthusiast.

The new challenge for the last generation of Gugliermetto company is to write chapters of another beginning.