Sandro Petti

Architect, landscape designer and painter, Sandro Petti was one of the most stylish exponents of Roman design in the 1960s and 1970s. His furniture, lighting and mirrors, in polished brass, chrome, Lucite and glass, combine sculptural boldness with a sense of theatre and glamour that captures the spirit of their age. Rooted in the artistic life of post-war Rome, his work embodies the effortless sophistication of the Italian dolce vita interior, and is today much admired by collectors and decorators.

Sandro Petti was born in Rome in 1927. Architect, landscape designer and painter, he made the historic centre of the capital the focus of his creative, professional and personal life. For more than a quarter of a century, from 1945 to 1972, his six studios on the Via Margutta, the legendary street of artists, welcomed figures of the calibre of Giorgio de Chirico, Piero Dorazio, Renato Guttuso, Sante Monachesi and Mimmo Rotella.

It was in the 1960s and 1970s that he developed the sophisticated formal language for which he is known today. Working in polished brass, chrome, Plexiglas, Lucite and glass, materials that became the signatures of his creations, he designed tables, mirrors and lighting of sculptural, elegant and theatrical line. Much of this work was produced in collaboration with the Roman workshop L'Angolo Metallarte, one of the city's leading addresses for avant-garde design at the time. His cocktail tables, with their massive cruciform Lucite bases, mirror-polished chrome frames and smoked glass tops, remain among the most emblematic pieces of the era's glamour.

In later life Petti left Rome for Ischia, the "Green Island", where he devoted himself to studying ways of improving the traffic and aesthetics of both cities, above all of Ischia, an island to which he felt he owed a great deal. In 2008 he published two books, one on the Tiber and one on Ischia. He died in 2022.