B&B Italia’s Outdoor Icons Face the Australian Sun

Jamie Green and Joseph Gardner set five B&B Italia outdoor designs against bright Australian summer light for Vogue Living’s “Sun Seeker” story.

Four words open B&B Italia‘s caption for the story: “High sun, electric composure.” The post credits a Vogue Living editorial titled “Sun Seeker,” photographed by Jamie Green and styled by Joseph Gardner, and it names five outdoor designs by four of the most recognizable designers in the company’s catalogue. The shoot was produced for Space Furniture, B&B Italia’s Australian partner of more than three decades, and it ran in Vogue Living’s January/February 2026 issue, where the editor’s letter began the edition outside, pointing to a summer of bright days and late evenings spent in the open air.

The rest of the caption lays out the idea in a single line: pieces with real sculpture weight that stay compose under summer heat and lend a crisp, assertive presence to the architecture around them. That is an unusual brief for outdoor furniture, a category often sold on lightness and the promise of disappear into a garden. Sun Seeker runs the other way, toward objects with enough mass and outline to be read as forms in their own right, and the product list follows that logic closely.

Signal. What happened: B&B Italia shared Vogue Living’s “Sun Seeker” editorial, a shoot of its outdoor collection made for Space Furniture, shown by Jamie Green and styled by Joseph Gardner. Exact object: La Bambola Outdoor by Mario Bellini, Crinoline Outdoor and Husk Outdoor by Patricia Urquiola, Erica Outdoor by Antonio Citterio, and Borea Round by Piero Lissoni. When and where: the story appeared from page 30 of Vogue Living’s January/February 2026 issue in Australia, and the pieces are sold locally through Space Furniture, including its standalone B&B Italia Outdoor showroom at 85 Commonwealth Street, Surry Hills, Sydney. Source: B&B Italia’s own credit for the shoot, Vogue Living’s published issue contents, and Space Furniture’s product and journal pages. Why it matters: the lineup compresses more than fifty years of B&B Italia seating, from a 1972 armchair design to a 2025 system expansion, into one sunlit story, and it lands in the market B&B Italia chose for its first outdoor-only store anywhere.

 

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Jamie Green started shooting pro in his late twenties, after moving north from Melbourne to Byron Bay, and in Vogue Living’s contributor notes for the issue he recalled landing his first international campaign roughly a year later. He now lives on three acres in the hills around Newrybar, inland from Byron, with his two young children. The B&B Italia job, he told the magazine, arrived while he had been leaning into “still life with a human element.” For a furniture story, that approach keeps the objects at the centre of the frame while holding on to the sense that they are made to be sat in, lounged on and lived around.

Joseph Gardner, Vogue Living’s style editor, came to the magazine as a trained interior designer, and his work there spans styling the title’s featured homes and championing emerging Australian makers. Alongside the magazine he runs his own curatorial space for art and design. Summer outdoor stories are familiar ground for him: for the January/February 2019 issue he produced a roundup of outdoor loungers and recliners. On a shoot like Sun Seeker, the stylist settles which configurations, frame finishes and fabrics appear and how each piece meets its setting, decisions that determine how much of the caption’s composure actually reaches the page.

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Mario Bellini designed Le Bambole for B&B Italia in 1972, a family of soft, rounded sofas and armchairs that won the Compasso d’Oro in 1979 and remains one of the company’s signature designs. Fifty-two years later the armchair went outdoors. Mario Bellini’s La Bambola Outdoor arrived in B&B Italia’s 2024 outdoor collection, keeping the original’s curves and generous proportions while switching to weather-resistant materials, many of them recycled and recyclable. The same launch revived a rattan seating line drawn from a 1975 Bellini project, and B&B Italia had the whole 2024 range photographed at a modernist house in Spain’s Matarraña region.

The specification sheet explains how a piece this soft survives open air. The frame and ferrules are polyethylene, the padding is cold-shaped polyurethane foam with polyester fibre and a breathable mesh, the feet are covered in thermoplastic polyurethane, and the cover is removable. B&B Italia’s US online shop lists the armchair as made to order with delivery in 18 to 22 weeks, and its footprint is roughly 115 by 75 centimetres. There are no visible legs. The chair sits low and whole on the ground, exactly the kind of silhouette that holds its own in a frame full of hard light.

Bellini, born in 1935, has seen Le Bambole through more than one life. For the collection’s fiftieth anniversary B&B Italia reworked it with structural changes, new coverings and a construction that lets its components be dismantled and recycled, and the outdoor armchair carries that same thinking into a version built to stay outside.

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Patricia Urquiola has been central to B&B Italia’s outdoor business since the company re-entered the category in 2007 with one of her collections. Patricia Urquiola’s Crinoline followed in 2008, named after the structured underskirts of nineteenth-century dress. Its chairs carry one wide curve through the base, the seat and the backrest, an effect Urquiola has likened to a double shell. The structure is aluminium, chosen for being light, recyclable and rustproof, and the polyethylene fibre weave was developed with B&B Italia’s research and development centre to have a surprisingly natural texture. The family spans small armchairs, chairs and stools as well as tall armchairs that stand around 156 centimetres high, and some backs are laced in a floral pattern. Versions woven in abaca, a natural fibre, are intended for covered terraces and verandas rather than open sky.

Husk takes the opposite approach, hard outside and soft within. Urquiola’s Husk began indoors in 2011 as a shell of Hirek, a plastic made from recycled and recyclable polymers, cradling quilted cushions that borrow the pattern of classic capitonné upholstery. The outdoor version followed soon after: a white Hirek shell on an aluminium swivel base, with cushions built to let rainwater pass through rather than pool. Space Furniture notes that the outdoor Husk is now made entirely from recycled materials, and its components are designed to come apart for recycling at the end of the product’s life.

Urquiola, born in Spain and based in Milan, headed the design group at Piero Lissoni’s studio from 1996 before founding her own practice in 2001. That history gives the shoot a small family tree: two of its five pieces come from a designer who once led design inside the studio of the man responsible for a third.

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Antonio Citterio’s Erica first appeared in 2017 as a set of armchairs, sofas and chairs, including a stackable model, designed for hotels and restaurants as much as private terraces. That contract pedigree matters to the label, whose outdoor pieces furnish luxury hotel properties around the world. It went on to become the bestseller of B&B Italia’s outdoor catalogue, and in 2025 the company widened it into a complete system. The update added sofas with a gentle curve for conversational layouts, a curved dormeuse, high-backed armchairs and a deep daybed with an integrated headrest, plus sun loungers, tables and a run of new striped and solid outdoor fabrics.

What ties the range together is consistent hardware: powder-coated die-cast aluminium frames, interlacing in polypropylene strips reinforced by a high-resistance internal core, and a foot detail repeated from piece to piece. Antonio Citterio’s Erica ’25 chaise longue adds a backrest that adjusts through several positions, a padded mattress, stacking and wheels. Next to Bambola and Husk, Erica is a study in line rather than mass, an open weave that throws patterned shadow in strong sun and keeps the frame visibly light.

Citterio was born in Meda, north of Milan, in 1950. He opened his design office in 1972, graduated in architecture in Milan in 1975, and has spent decades working with B&B Italia, a collaboration built around his habit of thinking in systems rather than single pieces. Erica’s growth from a handful of chairs into an outdoor programme is a clear example of that method at work.

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Piero Lissoni introduced Borea in early 2021, not long after being named B&B Italia’s artistic director, and he described it in aviation terms, as an aeroplane that had come in to land. The comparison is literal in the hardware. Every piece rests on tubular metal frames bent into continuous lines without joints or interruptions, using bending techniques borrowed from aircraft manufacture, and the seating frames stack. The cushions come with a figure B&B Italia likes to cite: the polyester fibre filling of a three-seater sofa is made from 510 recycled PET bottles of 1.5 litres each.

“Borea Round” in the caption points to the circular end of the family. Piero Lissoni’s Borea small tables stand on slim painted steel rods with tops in enamelled lava stone, offered in sage, clay and ocean blue, and the round versions come in diameters of 42.5, 62.5 and 88 centimetres. Larger Borea dining tables pair the same steel supports with tops in teak or glazed lava stone. In a shoot about pieces holding their ground, the lava stone tops supply the hardest surfaces in the lineup, a material formed by heat set back out in the sun.

Lissoni studied architecture in Milan, graduating in 1985, and founded his practice the following year. He now runs his studio between Milan and New York. He has said he wanted to build aeroplanes as a child, a boyhood interest that Borea makes explicit in aluminium and steel. In Australia, Space Furniture took the full Borea range into its showrooms and online store soon after the collection’s launch.

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Space Furniture has carried B&B Italia in Australia for more than thirty years, and in mid-2025 the partnership produced something B&B Italia had not done anywhere else: a standalone showroom given over entirely to its outdoor collection. The store at 85 Commonwealth Street in Surry Hills, a former rag-trade district now home to architecture studios, galleries and restaurants, was launched with an evening event on Thursday 26 June 2025. Guests lined up at a photo booth built around Urquiola’s Crinoline armchair, and coverage of the opening put the share of the outdoor catalogue on display at more than 90 percent.

In a statement at the opening, B&B Italia described Sydney as one of the most dynamic hubs in Asia-Pacific, a priority region for the company, and as a city whose outdoor-leaning way of living suits the collection. Vogue Living covered the opening in its July/August 2025 issue. Sun Seeker reads as the next chapter of that same relationship: a story made for Space Furniture, with pieces sold on Commonwealth Street photographed in Australian summer light by a photographer based in the hills behind Byron Bay. B&B Italia’s post tags both Space Furniture’s Australian account and its Asia account; the group also runs showrooms in Singapore and Malaysia.

The scale behind that partnership is considerable. Piero Ambrogio Busnelli founded the company in 1966 as C&B, a joint venture with a fellow Italian furniture maker, and it made its name by bringing cold-moulded polyurethane foam into upholstered furniture, an industrial approach that set it apart from the small artisan workshops then typical of the sector. The group now sells in more than 80 countries through upwards of 800 stores, and its outdoor division, first launched in 1975 and revived in 2007, is the part of the business the Surry Hills store was built to showcase.

Australian pricing for most of the range is handled by quote. Space Furniture’s site lists the Erica ’25 chaise longue at AU$8,615 and the Borea sofa from AU$16,830, with much of the remaining B&B Italia Outdoor range marked as custom order.