A Personal Living Experience: Gala Seating System by Cristina Celestino.

With a nod to the 70s, the sculptural fashion of Pierre Cardin and Roberta di Camerino’s plissé investigations, Cristina Celestino unveils Gala, a new hybrid and flexible seating system for Saba. Soft, yet defined by geometries taken from nature and architecture, the sofa a perfect synthesis of the designer’s personal language, connecting both tradition and innovation in one object.

The project responds to the desire to investigate the sofa as a place rather than a mere functional product, dematerialising the very concept of traditional living and to create a sofa with a strong iconographic design component. With a subtle reference to the retro-future atmosphere of sofas that inhabited the 70s, the new collection explores the flexibility of the upholstered object as a sculptural and sophisticated volume.

The central backbone is a vertical element that draws pleated curves ready to accommodate, both on the front as well as on the back, a seat-cushion element of different depths. The many possible configurations give life to a “hybrid” and flexible sofa open to interaction.

The sofa takes its name from its associated elegance and sophistication but also, a little more left of field, Gala is a reference to one of the planets in Star Wars and an indirect tribute to the “world of stars” and the optimism and the avant-garde that characterized that era.

“Gala is a contemporary seating system but, as always, my research moved freely through time, in search for references from most diverse contexts, to reach a synthesis of my journey,” Celestino elaborates. “If the theme of plissé so dear to me, as investigated by Roberta di Camerino, is part of my ideas, it was then contaminated with the visionary and sculptural fashion of Pierre Cardin. So was the retro-future atmosphere typical of the 70s interiors and the production of upholstery of that precursory era of a very unrestrained and free-from-schemes vision of the sofa.”

You can see the Gala at home in a special residential project by Cristina shown below, which we published earlier this year.

A Pink Apartment in Udine by Cristina Celestino.

Before its redesign, this apartment in Udine would have been that pot-bellied uncle constantly out of breath. Simply put, it was in sorry shape—and it badly needed a facelift. Thus twirled in Milanese designer Cristina Celestino, with her magic palette and her design wand in tow...

[Images courtesy of Cristina Celestino. Photography by Mattia Balsamini.]