At Icone Talks, Giovanna Castiglioni talks to us about the studio that has become a museum and the memory of one of the fathers of great Italian design.

A studio that became a museum but remained a studio. You look around and everything is still as it was, full of work, creativity and projects that have been carried out or are about to be put into production. “A person once told me ‘it looks like your father has gone out for coffee and is about to come back at any moment,'” Giovanna Castiglioni, daughter of the great designer Achille Castiglioni, told us.

In January 2006, Giovanna and the Castiglioni heirs signed a five-year agreement with the Triennale di Milano so that the Achille Castiglioni Studio Museum could be opened to the public and continue its articulate archival work. The success with the public, which has brought more than 40,000 visitors (as of 2020), has convinced the Castiglioni family to continue to share the place and the stories it holds with people.


For this reason and to develop the many projects in which the Studio Museum is involved, in 2011 the Fondazione Achille Castiglioni was born, a magical place of which Giovanna Castiglioni is the narrator, the person who guides “in a crazy way,” as she says, the visit to the archives.

“It’s an architecture studio turned into a museum, a concentration of design even though we don’t design anymore, because he (Achille) and his brother (Pier Giacomo) are missing. But we do museum activities, people book and come to visit this particular place, they ring the bell and we welcome them as if they were entering a house,” Giovanna Catiglioni told us.”

During the episode of Icone Talk dedicated to Castiglioni, Icone’s art director Giulio Cappelli recounted some of his memories of the place: “Achille’s studio has always been like that, I used to admire all the objects hidden in these cabinets of mystery. I once accompanied the British designer Tom Dixon on a visit to the studio and Tom was speechless, he looked like a child at Luna Park”.

For the Studio Museo Achille Castiglioni, 2022 is an important anniversary; it’s 60 years since it opened. 1962 was an extraordinarily creative year for the Castiglioni brothers, during which they designed such historic pieces of Italian design as the Arco, Taccia, Toio, Relemme and Ventosa lamps, a counterweight, a foot switch, the Sleeck (mayonnaise spoon), the Giro (armchair), the Pitagora (coffee machine)… An incredible year to which the Fondazione Achille Castiglioni will dedicate an exhibition in 2022.

You can review and listen to the Talk between Giuglio Cappellini and Giovanna Castiglione on IGTV of Icone.