The Italian house that also goes outside: B&B Italia’s outdoor program
Known for the UP armchair and the Charles sofa, B&B Italia has run a serious outdoor program for decades — Mirto, Ayana, Gio and Borea among them — applying the same designers and construction standards to furniture built for the terrace.
When most American buyers encounter B&B Italia, they meet it through the indoor canon: the UP armchair, the Charles sofa, the Camaleonda, the Tufty-Time. These are the pieces that built the house’s reputation since Piero Ambrogio Busnelli founded it in Novedrate, Como province, in 1966. What is less often noted is that B&B Italia has run a substantial outdoor program in parallel for well over a decade — one that draws on the same design roster and applies the same construction standards to furniture built for the terrace.
The outdoor program took a clear shape with Mirto Outdoor, which Antonio Citterio completed in 2013. Mirto is a comprehensive system: chairs, armchairs, loungers, dining tables and accessories, built on a light die-cast aluminium frame with seat and back in Batyline hemp-fibre mesh. That material choice — a natural-looking hemp fibre rather than the synthetic meshes then prevalent in the sector — was in keeping with the indoor catalogue’s attention to material quality. Table tops in the Mirto range are offered in aluminium, Iroko wood slats, porcelain stoneware and enamelled lava stone, which gives the system enough range to move between the poolside lounger and the formal dining terrace.
B&B Italia draws on the same designers and the same construction disciplines for its outdoor program as for the indoor catalogue — the terrace is not a separate brief.
Two takes on teak
The catalogue’s teak-based outdoor collections sit at different points on the formality spectrum. Naoto Fukasawa’s Ayana, introduced in 2020, is built on FSC-certified solid teak left unpainted so the wood ages and greys naturally over time. Table tops are in serpentine stone. The design language draws on Japanese and Nordic formal traditions, giving the collection a quietness suited to the considered terrace. Antonio Citterio’s Gio takes teak in a different direction: the frame is offered in a natural finish or in an antique grey treatment that brings silver-grey reflections into the wood grain. Back and armrests are interlaced with polypropylene ribbons that can be removed separately, making the pieces easy to disassemble for winter storage — a practical advantage for US buyers in climates with a hard frost.
Borea and the materials argument
The most discussed recent addition is Borea, which Piero Lissoni completed in 2021. It is covered in full in our Borea collection dispatch; the essentials are that it built its identity around an explicit sustainability argument. The tubular aluminium frames are shaped using metal-bending techniques borrowed from the aeronautical sector, giving pieces a notably light silhouette. Table tops are in lava stone from the slopes of Etna, glazed with a material recovered from discarded television and computer monitors. Cushions are filled with polyester fibre from recycled PET plastic bottles. The collection won the 2022 Green Good Design Award from the Chicago Athenaeum and the European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies. Taken together, the outdoor program at B&B Italia now spans everything from the poolside lounger to the dining table, and it applies to each the same design disciplines that shaped the indoor catalogue. Collections reach US buyers through authorised dealers; lead times vary by line, configuration and finish.