The Return of the P3 | GUBI, Bonacina 1889, and the Enduring Vision of Tito Agnoli

Sixty years on, GUBI and Bonacina 1889 return the P3 to the world exactly as Tito Agnoli intended. It is a reintroduction that asks very little of the present moment, because the original asked so little of time. The P3 Lounge Chair and P3S Chaise Longue, first drawn in 1964 and produced in the workshops of Brianza, have lost nothing in the intervening decades. 

A Designer Who Worked from the Inside

Born in Lima in 1931 to Italian parents, Tito Agnoli arrived in Milan after the Second World War and came of age during one of the most extraordinary periods in the history of Italian design. The city was rebuilding, and with it came a generation of designers, architects, and makers who believed that well-made objects could be part of a better future. 

Training across art, architecture, lighting, and furniture, he collaborated throughout his career with some of the most significant Italian manufacturers of the postwar era, among them Arflex, Poltrona Frau, and Molteni. But where many designers of his standing maintained a distance from production, Agnoli worked differently. He embedded himself within the organisations he collaborated with, spending time on the factory floor alongside technicians and production teams. He learned each process from the inside, and let that knowledge shape what he drew. It is what led him to rattan, and to Bonacina 1889.

A Partnership Rooted in Craft

Bonacina 1889 is one of the oldest and most respected rattan workshops in Italy, based in Brianza, the region north of Milan that has long been the heart of Italian furniture-making. The house has a particular gift for understanding what rattan can do: how it bends, how it holds, how it responds to the hand of a skilled weaver over days of careful work. When Agnoli brought his architectural sensibility to the workshop in the early 1960s, the result was a collection of pieces that felt entirely new and entirely natural at once.

The P3 Lounge Chair and P3S Chaise Longue, designed in 1964, are the finest expression of that collaboration. Each beginning with a continuous tubular steel frame, precisely bent and galvanised, before skilled artisans weave hundreds of metres of split rattan across its surface by hand. The P3 Lounge Chair holds a light, upright posture suited to relaxed conversation; the P3S Chaise Longue extends into near-horizontal repose, its geometry softened by the warmth of the woven material. No two pieces emerge identical.