A century told in four movements

Renzo Frau was born in Cagliari in 1881 and founded his company in Turin in 1912, several hundred kilometres from home. He was not a trained designer. He had served as an officer in Milan, married Savina Pisati, and taken work as a sales representative, latterly for a manufacturer of imitation leather. It was that job that sent him to Britain, and Britain that introduced him to the Chesterfield.

Turin at that moment was the engine room of Italian industry. The motor works were expanding, money was arriving in a city that had not previously had much of it, and a professional class was furnishing rooms it wanted to be taken seriously in. Frau began by importing the English club chair, then by building his own.

The company was called Poltrona Frau, which translates as Frau Armchair, and the plainness of that is worth sitting with. There was no attempt to sound like a house of couture. The name announced a single object, made well, by a named person. Frau is a Sardinian surname, not the German noun, and the confusion has followed the company for a century.

The Chester appears in the first catalogue of 1912: pleated armrests, hand-executed capitonné, biconical steel springs tied onto a seasoned beech frame. The house has never claimed to have invented the Chesterfield. What Frau established was not a style but a standard, that the frame must be built honestly because the leather will eventually reveal any shortcut beneath it. That principle has proved more durable than any individual design.

Through the 1920s the house widened its range into bergère, cockpit and dormeuse models, and began supplying hotels, offices and transatlantic liners. In 1919 it produced an armchair, catalogued today by that year, understood to have been commissioned by the Duke of Pistoia. In 1926 it was appointed an official supplier to the Italian Royal Household.

Renzo Frau died in the same year, having run his company for barely fourteen years. In most tellings of most companies this is where the story quietly stops. Here it does not, because Savina Pisati took over the business and ran it, as she had already done once during his absence in the First World War.

She held the house together through the interwar decades, a period when the Italian economy was volatile and a small workshop making expensive armchairs was an obviously fragile proposition. In 1930 she put model 904 into production, developed from sketches her husband had left behind, and in the same year the company furnished first-class seating for the liner Rex.

Model 904 is an armchair of almost aggressive comfort: arms that curve inward to hold the sitter, a rounded back, a front worked in deep diamond buttoning, and a single row of leather-covered pins running the back and sides. It has stayed in production ever since. It acquired the name Vanity Fair in 1984, and by then it had long since done more than any advertisement to define what an Italian leather chair looks like.

In 1962 the company was acquired by the Nazareno Gabrielli group and left Turin for Tolentino, in the province of Macerata on the Adriatic side of the country. It has stayed there. On paper this was a relocation. In practice it was the moment the house found the conditions it needed.

The Marche was dense with tanneries and leather works, much of it serving the shoe industry. That meant a local population who understood hides as a working material rather than an abstraction: how a skin varies from spine to belly, where it will stretch and where it will refuse, how to cut so the tension falls in the right place once the piece is assembled.

The making sequence that settled there is essentially tailoring at furniture scale. A frame is built from seasoned beech. Biconical steel springs are tied by hand onto jute belts and tested. Padding is built up in layers of vegetable and rubberised horsehair rather than cut from a block, so the piece softens over years instead of collapsing at once. Goose down goes into the seat cushions. The leather goes on last, stretched by hand, judged by feel rather than by gauge.

Capitonné is where this is most visible. Every button on a buttoned front is drawn through by hand, and the surplus leather that gathers around it is folded into a pleat running in the same direction as every other pleat on that piece. Get one wrong and the eye finds it immediately. There is still no machine that does it convincingly, which is the entire reason the technique remains a marker of the house.

The leather itself became a discipline of its own. In 1986 the company built a formal colour system with the chromatologist Paolo Minoli, eventually running to 96 shades; in 2020 it replaced that with a new range developed with the colourist Giulio Ridolfo, organised into seven families. The hides are dyed with anilines in the drum, so colour is carried through the thickness of the skin rather than laid across its face.

Gio Ponti's Dezza, in 1965, was the first product of the Tolentino era and the start of a habit. Over the following decades the catalogue filled with work by people who did not work for the company: the Castiglioni brothers' Sanluca, Ferdinand Alexander Porsche's ergonomic Antropovarius in 1982, Pierluigi Cerri's structurally exposed Ouverture in the same year, the Vignellis' Intervista in 1989.

At the same time the work escaped the domestic room altogether. In 1986 the house trimmed the interior of the Lancia Thema 8.32, beginning an automotive business that now covers a long list of European marques and runs from plants in Tolentino, Montegranaro and, since 2024, Coventry. In 1998 it upholstered its first series-production Ferrari.

That same year it built the RP01 armchair for Renzo Piano's Auditorium Parco della Musica in Rome, and a second business opened alongside the first. Auditorium seating has since taken the workshop to the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg for Herzog & de Meuron, the Oslo Opera House for Snøhetta, the Fondation Louis Vuitton for Frank Gehry, the Fondation Cartier for Jean Nouvel and the Academy Museum in Los Angeles for Renzo Piano again. These are the hardest conditions the craft faces: thousands of inspections a week, and standards for wear and fire performance that no household will ever impose.

The company reached its centenary in 2012 and opened a museum at Tolentino to mark it, some 1,400 square metres laid out by Michele De Lucchi. In 2014 the Poltrona Frau Group, by then including Cassina and Cappellini, was bought by the American manufacturer Haworth and delisted from the Milan exchange. In 2022 the leather went chrome-free, with a stated intention to convert every collection by 2030.

Read across the whole century, the pattern is unusually clear. The company has changed owner, city, market and generation repeatedly. What has not changed is the sequence: choose the hide, cut it correctly, build the frame honestly, stretch the leather by hand, and let the object earn its appearance over the next forty years.