Cars are everywhere in Milan during Salone del Mobile (except in the form of taxis when you need them the most). On Corso Venezia are the shops of Bentley Home and Bugatti Home, where customers can buy furniture that makes living rooms feel like the inside of a sports car. Around Cassina’s showroom on Via Durini circulates a Lancia Ypsilon with sapphire-blue interiors courtesy of the Italian furniture titan. Audi is presenting its latest models in a Studio Drift-designed pavilion in Piazza Quadrilatero, one of the city’s grandest courtyards. What we’re seeing right now is every kind of crossover: furniture designed by car brands, cars designed by furniture brands, and just cars on display in the ritziest corners of Milan. Meanwhile, the Geneva International Motor Show – once the industry’s premier convention – has cancelled this year’s edition due to lack of interest from manufacturers. It seems that the automotive sector has backed out of its own jamborees, rolled up in Milan in time for Design Week and parked.

The growing presence of car brands in Milan partly follows the example set by luxury fashion, which has also expanded its footprint at Fuorisalone. This is evident in the trajectory of Luxury Living Group, a Forlì-based manufacturer that first introduced a licensed furniture collection with Fendi in 1987. Today the Italian firm produces furniture lines for the likes of Dolce & Gabbana and Versace, as well as Bentley and Bugatti. “Up until a few years ago, we were the rare birds doing this,” says Andrea Gentilini, CEO of Luxury Living. “Now most luxury brands have started on the same journey.” 

Gentilini lists off labels such as Hermès, Bottega Veneta and Gucci, which consistently present designs at Salone that give traditional furniture firms a run for their money. Cars, however, have a particular claim on being in the world capital of design. In the 20th century, when furniture started being industrially produced, many designers drew inspiration – as well as technical components – directly from the automotive sector. In one famous example, Italian designers Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni ordered a US-made car headlight, connected it to an electric cord and perched it on top of a steel pole. Launched in 1962, the Toio remains one of the bestselling floor lamps made by Flos. In 1981 a young architect called Ron Arad found the leather seat of a Rover P6 in a London junkyard, mounted it on a steel frame and created the chair that launched his career. 

Tongue in cheek or not, many modernist designers admired the beauty and efficiency of car design and manufacturing, and saw it as an ideal to be adopted in their field. Architects have also always jumped on the chance to design some wheels. In 1936, Le Corbusier took part in an open design competition to create an affordable French car. His submission was the Voiture Minimum, a strange design with a round profile and flat sides. It anticipated the outlines of cars that entered production decades later. 

In 1978, Italian designers Elio Fiorucci, Ettore Sottsass and Andrea Brianzi spruced up an Alfa Romeo Giulietta with denim-coloured Pirelli wheels and an interior entirely covered in green fur and mustard-yellow velvet. The one-off Alfa Romeo Punk was widely panned by critics at the Geneva vehicular salon, who found it bizarre. (With hindsight, perhaps the Swiss should have been more welcoming to frivolous and left-field ideas.)

What makes today’s car-furniture crossovers different is that the automotive brands are willing participants in them. While the Castiglioni brothers didn’t ask anyone before they repurposed some spare parts, this time around everybody is in on the action. “This collaboration is a two-way street,” says Giovanni del Vecchio, CEO of Giorgetti. At the furniture label’s showroom on Milan’s Via della Spiga, visitors can admire the Giorgetti Maserati edition, an armchair and pouf inspired by the sports car’s design language (and a permanent addition to the brand’s collection), as well as the Maserati Giorgetti edition, a one-off Grecale Folgore (an all-electric SUV) with interiors inspired by the design house. More than borrowing technical parts or techniques, the collaborators emphasised shared values. “Both of these brands represent everything that is beautiful and well crafted in Italy,” says Del Vecchio. “Each is in its own sector but when they talk to each other, they speak the same language.”

These tête-à-têtes have created furniture collections with their aesthetics rooted in the automotive world. Giorgetti’s Lorelei armchair and the Teti pouf have soft seats encased in outer shells that are upholstered either in leather or lacquered in gradient hues – finishes familiar from high-end cars. There are also no hard corners. “It’s as though the design went through an air tunnel,” says Del Vecchio.

The Bentley and Bugatti collections created by Luxury Living are similarly subtle, with sycamore veneer sofas that nod to the dashboards of Bentley cars, or a dining chair stitched with leather as supple as a Bugatti’s seat. Gentilini explains that creating high-end furniture is a far more sensitive and time-consuming endeavour than typical branded collaborations, which often involve little more than slapping on a logo. “If I would get a Ferrari project, it’s not like I would make a chair the shape of a prancing horse,” he says. “This is about interpreting the values, codes and language of the brand and translating it into something that you can have in your home.” 

It remains to be seen whether people like their cars to feel like living rooms and their living rooms to feel like their cars. Yet the collaborations are a reminder that the two sectors have a common history and heritage, even though only one can go from zero to 100.