Paper furnishings: the designs for furniture from the Lenci manufacture
The Lenci manufactory, founded in Turin in 1919 by Elena König and her husband Enrico
Scavini, specialized in the creation of puppets and dolls in colored fabric, wooden toys,
clothing and fashion items, adding a more limited production of furniture for children’s
rooms and home decoration accessories, designed by leading artists called to collaborate
over the years with the company. The paper analyzes Gigi Chessa, Mario Sturani and
Giuseppe Porcheddu’s inventions through a corpus of drawings and technical projects
conserved in a private collection in Turin, which allow us to highlight the co-existence
within the Lenci repertoire of different stylistic trends, starting from furnishings inspired
by shapes and models of the past to arrive at the experiments closer to the innovations
of international Déco, up to the typical production in Lenci style, characterized by bright
colors, original forms and iconographic references taken from the world of fairy tales and
childhood.