Raw and Refined: Inside a Renovated Brutalist Apartment in Rome

A Brutalist-inspired apartment in the suburbs of Rome in Tor de’ Cenci recently received a complete renovation by STUDIOTAMAT. Designed for a lawyer couple, the project consisted of renovating the 120-square-meter apartment, along with a coveted 40-square-meter terrace. The Casa Rude residence overlooks the Castelporziano Nature Reserve offering both wooded and sea views, an ideal locale after years of living in small apartments in the heart of the city. Now, their space is filled with natural light, original character, and modern conveniences.

“What guided us in the design was the desire to enhance the distinctive features of the unique terraced building, dating back to the 1980s, which houses the apartment. We wanted to restore fluidity to the spaces, encourage the opening, and the discovery of pre-existing materials and details, on which to set a new vision,” says STUDIOTAMAT co-founder Tommaso Amato.

The main living area is designed much like a open plan loft with unfinished walls and the support structure’s exposed concrete visually connecting the spaces.

Paired with the original Brutalist details are a variety of tones, textures, and materials that add up to a visually enticing space. The roughness of the terracotta tiles on the oval island and concrete pillars are juxtaposed with the smooth Patagonia marble countertops that connect the two.

A custom dining table with a Shou sugi treated wood top rests on a black base and a glossy red ceramic leg for a sleek look.

A large, multifunctional birch wood cube is built to hide the pantry, hold coats, provide storage, and house a TV.

A wall of perforated bricks separates the living room and home office allowing natural light to pass through. A custom desk extends out from the built-in shelves and is held up by a circular red wheel, complementing the dining table’s leg a few feet away. The wheel allows the desk to roll along on a track to a new position.

A pivoting door visually separates the public areas from the sleeping area, which houses a main bedroom with ensuite bathroom, and a guest room.

In the primary bedroom, sliding ribbed glass doors offer privacy to those in the bathroom while allowing light in.

The large terrace features an outdoor kitchen, seating areas, dining space, and outdoor shower, all of which benefit from sunset views.

Photography by Serena Eller Vainicher.

“Am I the unethical one?” A Philosophy Professor & His Cheating Students

“All I did was go to a website that is designed to facilitate cheating and set up a kind of camera to see who visited it.”

That’s Garret Merriam, associate professor of philosophy at Sacramento State University, who recently caught 40 of the 96 students in his online Introduction to Ethics course cheating on a take-home final exam.

The story begins with him using Google to see if some of the questions on his final exam were online, and finding a copy of one of his previous final exams on the website Quizlet. Ostensibly a study aid website, Quizlet allows users to upload materials to the site, such as exam questions and answers, and is one of many sites students use to cheat on their assignments. He emailed a request to Quizlet that they take down the exam, which they did. But finding the exam gave Merriam an idea.

I decided to ‘poison the well’ by uploading [to Quizlet] a copy of my final with wrong answers. (The final is 70-80 questions, all multiple choice, 5 options each.) Most of these answers were not just wrong, but obviously​ wrong to anyone who had paid attention in class. My thinking was that anyone who gave a sufficient number of those same answers would be exposing themselves, not only as someone who cheated by looking up the final online, but who didn’t even pay enough attention in class to notice how wrong the answers were.

When the students turned in their finals, and he noticed that many of the students had selected the “obviously wrong” answers from the planted version of the final, he had to decide how to distinguish the cheaters from those who merely made mistakes. He ended up using the following standard: if there was no more than a 1 in 100 chance that the number of matching wrong answers a student gave was a coincidence, he counted them as having cheated, as he explains:

When my students turned in their finals this semester, I compared their answers with the wrong answers from the planted test. A total of 45 questions on this semester’s final were on the planted final. (The exact questions change every semester, depending on a number of factors.) As expected, nearly all students had at least a few wrong answers that matched; statistically speaking this is likely given the number of questions. I ran a binomial analysis and found the likelihood that someone whose answers matched on 19 out of the 45 planted questions had about a 1:100 chance of doing so by coincidence. That was my (admittedly somewhat arbitrary) threshold, and anyone who matched at least that many, I suspected of cheating. (The highest match was 40 out of 45, which has a 1:10-Quintillion chance of being a coincidence.)

To my amazement, that threshold implies that 40 out of 96 students looked at and used the planted final for at least a critical mass of questions. 

When he confronted those students about this, most of them admitted they had cheated; the consequences for their grades are still being determined:

I emailed these students telling them what I had done and what I found. About 2/3rds of them confessed right away or denied it at first and quickly changed their tune. The remaining third either haven’t gotten back to me yet or have insisted on their innocence. (I am considering that possibility for one student who is right ‘on the bubble’, but the rest are upwards of 1:1 billion chance, or more.)

I am in discussion with my Chair about exactly what response is appropriate for these students, but a zero on the final is the bare minimum, and an F in the class is likely for some, if not all of those who cheated.

He adds:

As you can probably imagine, this has been exceptionally stressful for me (I’m neither a forensic mathematician, nor a cop, so this work took a lot of time that I would have preferred to have spent grading final essays.)

Professor Merriam wanted to share what happened on Daily Nous to see what other people in philosophy made of the situation and the actions he took. He had discussed it a little on Twitter, and while some people were, he says, “sympathetic and supportive,” others (for example) expressed the view that what he did was itself unethical. He disagrees:

As far as I can tell, their argument seems to boil down to the claim that my actions were deceptive or dishonest. I was accused of ‘entrapment’ and ‘honey-potting.’ More than a few seemed to think that my transgression was as bad or even worse than my students’. They suggested I should have just taken the copy of my test down and left it at that. As far as I can tell most of these people are not teachers of any kind, and none of them seemed to teach philosophy, ethics, or humanities.

These charges don’t make sense to me. I did not encourage or nudge my students to cheat, I did not do anything to make such cheating more likely or easier. Quite the opposite: I tell all my students what will happen if I catch them cheating, and I gave them a comprehensive study guide for the final.

As far as Quizlet goes, all I did was go to the website that is designed to facilitate cheating and set up a kind of camera to see who visited it. I honestly do not see what is objectionable about that. My University has an academic honesty policy that explicitly says that looking at other tests without the instructor’s permission counts as cheating  (Although had I know it would be this much of an issue I would have been explicit about that in my syllabus as well, rather than just linking to the policy, an oversight I plan to correct going forward.)

Though he disagrees with his critics, he “open to the possibility that I might be wrong”

Maybe (as the saying goes) I am the asshole here. But I would take that possibility a lot more seriously if that were the judgment of my immediate peers (philosophers at least, if not specifically ethicists), and even more so still if those peers could articulate an argument beyond simplistic accusations of dishonesty or ‘entrapment.’

So, I thought I would reach out to you and see if you could share this with Daily Nous readers and ask them: Am I the unethical one here?

That’s one question. But it might be more useful to consider more generally: (a) feasible cheat-deterring strategies for professors teaching large classes, (b) what professors should do when they catch their students cheating (when this is not settled by university policy), and (c) the extent to which professors should concern themselves with whether their students are cheating.

The post “Am I the unethical one?” A Philosophy Professor & His Cheating Students first appeared on Daily Nous.

The AI-Immune Assignment Challenge

AutomatED, a guide for professors about AI and related technology run by philosophy PhD Graham Clay (mentioned in the Heap of Links last month), is running a challenge to professors to submit assignments that they believe are immune to effective cheating by use of large language models.

Clay, who has explored the the AI-cheating problem in some articles at AutomatED, believes that most professors don’t grasp its severity. He recounts some feedback he received from a professor who had read about the problem:

They told me that their solution is to create assignments where students work on successive/iterative drafts, improving each one on the basis of novel instructor feedback.

Iterative drafts seem like a nice solution, at least for those fields where the core assignments are written work like papers. After all, working one-on-one with students in a tutorial setting to build relationships and give them personalized feedback is a proven way to spark strong growth.

The problem, though, is that if the student writes the first draft at home — or, more generally, unsupervised on their computer — then they could use AI tools to plagiarize it. And they could use AI tools to plagiarize the later drafts, too.

When I asserted to my internet interlocutor that they would have to make the drafting process AI-immune, they responded as follows…: Using AI to create iterative drafts would be “a lot of extra work for the students, so I don’t think it’s very likely. And even if they do that, at least they would need to learn to input the suggested changes and concepts like genre, style, organisation, and levels of revision.”…

In my view, this is a perfect example of a professor not grasping the depth of the AI plagiarism problem.

The student just needs to tell the AI tool that their first draft — which they provide to the AI tool, whether the tool created the draft or not — was met with response X from the professor.

In other words, they can give the AI tool all of the information an honest student would have, were they to be working on their second draft. The AI tool can take their description of X, along with their first draft, and create a new draft based on the first that is sensitive to X.

Not much work is required of the student, and they certainly do not need to learn how to input the suggested changes or about the relevant concepts. After all, the AI tools have been trained on countless resources concerning these very concepts and how to create text responsive to them.

This exchange indicates to me that the professor simply has not engaged with recent iterations of generative AI tools with any seriousness.

Climate change enables spread of flesh-eating bacteria in US coastal waters

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Lun is in a mad rush to help heat-pump installers decarbonize homes

Lun, a climate tech startup out of Denmark, is on a mission to help homes decarbonize fast — starting with heating systems and swapping out boilers for electric heat pumps.

What are heat pumps? The technology is a low carbon form of heating which is based on the principle of refrigeration that offers an alternative to environmentally unfriendly options like oil and gas-fired boilers. At a basic level, heat pumps work by using electricity to transfer heat from one place to another, so they’re able to both heat a house in winter and cool it in summer (or at least up to a balance point at which a supplemental system may be required).

There are several different types of heat pump (air-source, water-source, ground-source etc); and installations need to start with an assessment of the property which needs to consider a variety of factors before being able to go ahead — such as which type of pump is appropriate to the given property, land and climate; where to site units and components and whether to reuse elements of an existing heating system; how well (or poorly) insulated the property is; and even whether the heat pump brands a particular tradesperson prefers to work with are appropriate for the job in question.

The need for all this detailed up-front assessment complicates the sales process for heat pump installations — and that, in turn, slows down the decarbonization of households. Since in-demand plumbers and electricians may simply decide it’s easier to focus on other types of work (including, climate-horror-of-horrors, installing more fossil fuel burning boilers that pump CO2 directly into the atmosphere).

Helping redirect the energy (ha!) of installers towards decarbonization via fitting more heat pumps is what Lun hopes to do by building a platform for tradespeople — which it dubs an installation “operating system” — to provide them with “full stack” support so they can get on with ripping out boilers and replacing them with heat pumps. And, as they earn money doing that work, help decarbonize the planet faster.

Its software, which is currently in an alpha release with an undisclosed number of testers in Denmark, aims to take some of the strain out of installation assessments, design and planning, as well as handle other business elements like taking payments. It’s providing tradespeople with a suite of tools for gathering relevant data from householders and automating suitability assessments — doing the latter by drawing on public and/or open data (such as satellite imagery), as well as feeding in data from OEMs (such as price, specifications), as well as property type/location etc, to try to find the best match between a job and a professional installer.

“We start very small,” says co-founder and CEO Martin Collignon. “We start with where they lose the most time — which is in sales. Many of them go visit homes way too early, before they actually know whether the customer is interested or not. Or whether the house is relevant or not. And that’s what we focus on and then we build on the the entire stack all the way to payment… to make sure that they’re supporting every part of the journey. And they could focus on what they’re good at, what they trained at, and what they earn money on — which is installing the heat pump.”

“We want to make them more efficient,” he continues. “So right now around 40% of the time spent on heat pump sales and installation is spent on not installing the heat pump… So we just want them to be able to do more heat pump installations, over the year, because they have less of the other stuff to do — the sales, the design, the procurement, the financing, the paperwork, the compliance work, finding other [tradespeople]… all these things.

“We want to make it automated, with the technology in there, so they don’t have to spend time doing that… And the result of that is that doing heat pump work will be at least as profitable as the other task — and hopefully more profitable — so they can focus on heat pumps because it’s just a great job for them. So it’s not as much of a pain in the butt as it is today.”

“It’s an industry that is less digitalized than most… and our goal — and what we really focus on — is [building] a product that they see as a no brainer,” Collignon adds.  “That’s really the challenge because they’re busy enough. So we really need to build something that they love. And that’s what we focus on right now.”

Heat pumps are also just the start for Lun — as he says the big vision is for the platform to support tradespeople who’re able to apply a full sweep of renewable and decarbonizing technologies. Whether that’s installing electric charging points for vehicles, fitting PV panels to generate solar energy, or electrifying stoves. (In some rural regions of Europe solid fuel and/or wood burners for home heating are still absolutely a thing!)

Other startups are also looking to grease the pipe of household renewables — from the likes of Germany’s Zolar, Spain’s Samara, US-based OpenSolar or Are Solar, to name a few (there are also others focused on HVACs, such as US-based Conduit Tech) — but such is the scale of humanity’s home decarbonization task it’s going to take several villages’ worth of startups attacking the problem from as many angles as possible as fast as humanly possible. Or, as Collignon says, the more the merrier.

“We focus on heat pump now but our goal, our mission is to decarbonise homes faster in general,” he tells TechCrunch. “Heating is the major lever — that’s 80% of the energy consumption — but there’s a bunch of other things that we need to think about.

“So the goal really is that we can be the platform that all the tradespeople that want to aspire to be professionals in renewable technologies and decarbonisation technologies for buildings they can use that platform. And we focus very much — and will focus for a long time — on retrofits. So that’s taking the old buildings that we have and making them modern, more clean, more affordable [not dependent on] of fossil fuels that come from bad places around the world, basically.”

The Copenhagen-based startup was founded at the end of March last year, shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine. The war triggered a major crisis around Europe’s energy needs, amping up the argument for transitioning away from gas — now on geopolitical grounds, as well as the climate crisis. The Ukraine war was the final catalyst for the co-founders to formally incorporate Lun, per Collignon.

He’s a climate activist turned tech founder who before all this worked in the tech industry — for giants including Google and Uber. But after several years of grinding away at the Big Tech coalface he says he got “very, very badly” burnt out and decided to refocus his priorities. Then, along with his co-founder Anders Valentin — who brings a background in insurtech to the venture; and was a friend of Collignon from their business school days — the pair set about figuring how they could make maximum impact in the climate fight. Fast. And they landed on streamlining the installation of heat pumps.

“The simple reason we looked at heat pumps was it was mentioned in all the climate reports — you could find from the IPCC to the IEA to the European Union, everything — everyone mentioned heat pumps. But when we started looking at it, a bit more than two years ago, it was still a very niche technology where demand was the main issue but we knew from all these reports that they would change, hopefully soon, to a supply problem,” he explains, fleshing out their rational for starting with what’s still a pretty unfamiliar technology in many European markets. (Figures for installations can vary considerably depending on the country but overall numbers are still low; market data from the European Heat Pump Association puts the total figure of regional installation at 16.98 million or around 14% of Europe’s heating market.)

“So we started looking at what will be the issue — not now but really in five, seven years from now — for the industry. And it became very clear that [tradespeople] would become — very fast — a bottleneck… Plumbers is already the profession that we lack the most in Europe, way ahead of software engineers, for example. So we were really thinking it seems unlikely that we’re going to get more [tradespeople] before 2030 if you look at all the reports, so the only way we could solve this is really make the task of installing renewable technology into something more interesting — more economically viable — for these [tradespeople]. Because, if you think about it, they can do a bunch of other things… So that’s how we started looking at the problem. That’s what we’ve been doing since.”

Lun is being buoyed up in its decarbonization mission by closing a new round of funding — €10.3M in seed funds, which it’s announcing today — topping up a €550k pre-seed it raised previously to build its MVP. The seed funding comes from new investors including Norrsken VC, Partech, Lowercarbon Capital, and MCJ Collective as well as existing investor Foundamental. (Xoogler Ventures and other angel investors also backed its pre-seed.)

The funds will go on continuing to build out the product — making sure it delights the target user so Lun can get more of the critical skilled installers on board. It is also eyeing European expansion and Collignon notes it has an early partner in Austria so that is likely to be one of the next markets.

Commenting on the seed funding in a statement, Chris Sacca, founder of Lowercarbon Capital, said: “Getting off gas for heat isn’t just critical for the climate, if you live in Europe it’s the patriotic thing to do, and Lun is the cheapest, fastest, and easiest way to get an electric heat pump installed.”

“Changing the way we consume energy in our homes should be a top priority for everyone for many different reasons: Climate, health and economic well-being,” added Agate Freimane, Norrsken VC, in another supporting statement. “We were impressed by Lun’s speed of execution and excited to be supporting them on their journey.”

Foundamental’s Patric Hellermann dubbed electrifying buildings “top of mind” in the climate fight — with the “No.1 bottleneck” being making more installer-time available — going on to pronounce that Martin and Anders “have cracked that code with their software” in another statement.

Lun is a for-profit venture, despite its high worth climate mission. So what’s the business model? That’s still a work in progress, per Collignon, who says it’s exploring different revenue streams — potentially a subscription fee or a transaction model. He suggests they could also look to tap revenue streams around financing or even the heat pump hardware itself. “Your heat pump is quite an expensive thing — that can cost between €15,000 to €25,000 in many places — so we think there’s different ways where you can take a small cut of that. Basically, if you make things more efficient,” he adds.

When does he predict a tipping point for consumer uptake of heat pumps? And a mass move away from fossil fuel burners that we all desperately need to see happen ASAP. “When it’s worthwhile for consumers,” he responds on that. “I’ve worked in climate tech for quite some time and… it’s always the technology that makes it affordable for consumers that wins, basically, not the one that’s the greenest. So we need to make sure that it’s economically advantageous to instal heat pumps — and to instal these technologies more than anything else.

“I believe that when that will happen is when it becomes worthwhile. Which it was last year — when the gas prices were insane. And then now we see some countries moving with certain bans [on installing gas boilers after particular cut-off dates] and certain de facto obligations to instal heat pumps as your next in technology. Then that’s of course a game changer. And I believe that’s going to happen in more places.”

Another decarbonization ‘lever’ Collignon says he’s personally fought for in Denmark is making sure the “externalities of using fossil fuels are priced correctly”, as he puts it. Or reform of energy markets and taxation systems to support consumers to make green choices — so there’s definitely work for regulators to be getting on with here too. “Make sure you have a carbon tax that reflects the impact on the climate, basically, and if that happened, then it would be very obvious very very, very fast that it’s a lot better to use a heat pump — economically, for climate, for geopolitics etc — than it is today,” he adds.

Lun is in a mad rush to help heat-pump installers decarbonize homes by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch

Flote + Opus Give a Modern Edge to Group Seating

Comfort and high design collide in Hightower’s new Flote and Opus seating collections. Both are distinct and delightful with contemporary yet timeless aesthetics and the shared feeling of being embraced.

Flote brings the support, comfort, and easy relaxation of a pool float to its sofa and lounge. The team at Hightower went through extensive prototyping during the design phase to create that just-right sit. The Flote Sofa features a generous seat that’s large enough to seat three adults comfortably, making it a great fit for a group setting, whether that’s in a commercial or residential setting. Both the Flote Sofa and Flote Lounge bring a sense of lightness to users, with their curves, extended lumbar support, and inspired details making both easy to love.

Make Flote your own with unique seam and finish options. With the choice of an oversized welt, chunky zipper, or classic double-needle stitch, the collection can be customized to suit any space on the spectrum, from traditional to trendy.

Opus is Hightower’s contemporary take on the classic club chair that’s as comfortable as it is beautiful. Minimal and versatile, its seating can provide a sense of seclusion with its small footprint. The collection includes a chair and a lounge chair, both with a metal frame and upholstered seat and back.

Both designs feature a slender frame that adds a visual lightness, and either can be utilized in a conference room or at a dining table, complementing any aesthetic while doing so. Opus allows the rest of the space’s design choices shine while providing a classic yet modern edge. Choose from numerous finish options to make this collection work in spaces of all uses and sizes.

Bring together Opus’ simple style by taking advantage of optional contrasting fabrics on the back and seat, as well as custom frame colors. Whether it’s monochrome or high contrast, this collection makes it work and looks good doing it.

To learn more about Flote or Opus seating, visit hightoweraccess.com.

The Monochrome Collection Brings a New Appeal To Aluminum

Aluminum in its rawest form has a very industrial aesthetic, which is the beauty of the Monochrome line by Chinese designer Ximi Li for his own design-led brand URBANCRAFT. Moved to challenge conventional processes and explore the uncertainty of materials, he showcases the malleability and flexibility of aluminum in the Basics collection for Monochrome, which consists of a bar table, dining table, chairs, and other pieces. The series is extremely straightforward due to the avant-garde application of technique so that you can see exactly where the bends and welding marks are created.

The streamlined designs have a raw yet elegant quality to them due to the sinuous lines that train the eye to follow the silhouettes. The natural form of welding scars are a unique characteristic of the collection, highlighting how and where the aluminum parts come together. Although the series appears primitive, there is precise consistency and intention throughout the design expression. The simplicity of the materiality allows the collection to adapt well to both indoor and outdoor settings.

For more information on Monochrome, visit urbancraftdesign.com.

Nanocrystaline Chairs That Grow Themselves From Copper

Despite looking heavy yet delicate, Max Lamb’s Nanocrystaline Chairs are anything but. In 2006, the London-based artist began thinking about creating a chair using a material that could be melted away once it was encased in copper. This series of four chairs is the result.

Lamb molded each chair, one at a time, in order to use the very same wax for each. The mold was sprayed with a fine suspension of colloidal silver in alcohol, then submerged in a tank holding a solution of 15% copper. What happens next is referred to as the electro-deposition process. While soaking inside the tank, nanocrystals grew and encapsulated the wax in a honeycomb pattern – this is where the material’s strength and flexibility is found. After spending nearly a week in the tank, the chair’s shell was formed.

Once complete, the wax gets melted, drained into a custom heat box, and reused for the next design. While molding the sculptural chairs, Lamb considered their engineering as much as their appearance. The holes in each design help to provide thin, supporting walls of copper between the inner and outer portions. As mentioned, the chairs are both light and strong.

To learn more about the Nanocrystaline Chairs, visit maxlamb.org.

Images courtesy of the artist and Salon 94 Design. © Max Lamb.

Why Do Students Cheat?

ChatGPT is just one symptom of a more severe disease in higher education, namely, the multiple forms of meritocratic thinking......

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LAUN’s Sculptural Ribbon Collection Is Growing

Known for their California-inspired furniture designs as much as their architectural practice, Los Angeles-based design studio LAUN is expanding its outdoor Ribbon Collection. Two new pieces – the Ribbon Curved Sofa and the Ribbon Curved Bench – are joining the family of aluminum furniture. Modular in design like the rest of the collection, the curved sofa and bench can be moved around to create various seating situations to suit your needs. They were created by experimenting with the proportions and forms of the original Ribbon collection, allowing for the further expansion of its capabilities.

To learn more about the new additions to the Ribbon Collection, visit launlosangeles.com.

How cancer cured my eating disorder

Cancer turned out to be an effective, if inadvisable, treatment for a lifetime of disordered eating

Donkey Kong cheating case rocked by photos of illicit joystick modification

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Is second-hand cake as bad for you as second-hand smoke? On sweets in the workplace

On January 18, The Washington Post was either having a very slow news day or engaging in a hazing ritual for new editors. Why do I think this? Because of this article that somehow got published about how Dr. Susan, Jebb, chair of the UK Food Standards Agency personally doesn’t like it when people bring… Continue reading Is second-hand cake as bad for you as second-hand smoke? On sweets in the workplace

The Oru Collection Brings the Rounded Furniture Trend To Contract

The trend of furniture designed with soft volumes that we’ve been seeing throughout the past year doesn’t show any sign of moving on just yet. The aesthetic even translates beautifully to the contract world, case in point is the Oru collection. Designed by Patricia Urquiola for Andreu World, the influence of elements from the 1970s and Japanese design create a feeling and mood that’s bold and iconic. Throughout the collection of chairs and tables you’ll notice the ongoing use of three feet supporting each piece of furniture, showcasing topnotch craftsmanship.

The Oru collection was created for both casual and formal work settings, while remaining flexible, adaptable, and comfortable. In all, the series includes two types of chairs as well as coffee, dining, meeting, and auxiliary tables. The furniture all shares the same characteristic wooden structure that features rounded, soft geometries.

The Oru collection has received the Best of Year award from Interior Design Magazine in the category of best contract seat. The Oru table was also a finalist for the awards in the category of best table for contract.

To learn more about the Oru Collection, visit andreuworld.com.

Fungi Forest Toile Comes for the Le Bambole Capsule Collection

In her first-ever interiors collaboration, British eco-conscious pioneer Stella McCartney worked with B&B Italia on a series that launched at Art Basel Miami Beach. Based on both’s shared values of sustainability, the Le Bambole capsule collection features a hand-drawn “Fungi Forest” in a dark red and white toile print. The upholstery pattern was pulled from McCartney’s Summer 2022 runway collection, and can be seen adorning the exclusive Le Bambole armchair and Granbambola 3-seater sofa. In reimagining Mario Bellini’s armchair, McCartney was able to experiment with a designer’s work she loves while also celebrating Le Bambole’s 50th anniversary with B&B Italia.

Five decades after its introduction, Le Bambole has evolved using innovative design elements that contribute to its comfort and environmental footprint. The capsule collection brings together the quality and durability of B&B Italia with responsible materials and construction choices that are in line with McCartney’s eco-conscious mission. The new Le Bambole is designed to be fully disassembled, allowing for easy repairs when necessary and a circular end-of-life process to do the least harm.

While the original construction used a metal structure wrapped in polyurethane, the updated versions employ a recycled polyethylene frame, elements in polyurethane foam, and thermoplastic elastomers. These are encased in recycled polyester fabric beneath the upholstery to give Le Bambole its iconic shape, comfort, and breathability.

The capsule collection also introduces sustainable innovations developed by B&B Italia’s R&D team. Happily, Le Bambole’s upholstery is made of 100% biodegradable and toxin-free polyester that leaves no harmful microplastics in the environment. It’s produced using 25% bio-based, 75% petroleum based feedstock and made in audited mills which follow the strict OceanSafe Compliant standards, and the ink used for the print is Oeko-Tex® certified.

To learn more about Stella McCartney x B&B Italia three-piece capsule collection, visit bebitalia.com. They are available for purchase in all B&B Italia direct, mono-, and multi-brand stores globally as well as online.