Cara \ Davide, the Milanese design duo inventing a new design language

Founded in 2016 in Milan by Cara Judd, an interior design graduate from South Africa, and Davide Gramatica, an Italian product designer, Cara \ Davide creates diverse furniture pieces with resolutely sculptural forms. 

Inspired by the pair’s cross-cultural background, as well as a fascination with materials, techniques and processes related to different territories, their work is simultaneously contemporary and ancestral. ‘Slow, instinctive, dialectic’ is how Judd and Gramatica describe themselves. From the synthesis of their two personalities and their creative process, Cara \ Davide comes into being.

‘Segmento’ is the studio’s latest project, fuelled by the idea of breaking down and reassembling pine logs, and the collection includes a bench, chair and stool – ordinary enough objects but in an abstracted form. ‘Thick logs, solid and linear, are cut into segments and reassembled into compact and curving lines to create furniture of a fractured and angular nature, never symmetrical but different from any perspective,’ they say.

One of their first projects, Territorio – composed of a stool, a chair, and a cabinet, whose colour palette and shapes ‘pay tribute to the beauty of an African aesthetic’ – celebrates the harmony between the two designers while also highlighting the studio’s deep and respectful investigation of the materials. Territorio (meaning territory in Italian) was indeed a turning point for the duo, as they both affirm: ‘with this project, we feel that we managed to find a special meeting point of culture, context, material and production that represents us personally and as a duo and it has become the baseline of our work and practice.’

Since 2016, they have produced diverse furniture pieces with resolute and sculptural forms. From their Mobili Sintetici, basic and pure wooden elements, and their Calandra series, showcasing welding techniques and curvilinear shapes, to a collaboration with Danish design brand Muuto.

Through organic shapes, international influences, textured surfaces, and a dedicated material investigation, Cara \ Davide found its signature style with a very personal direction.

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