Ninety years ago, what started in a small workshop in Veneto, by a blacksmith named Giovanni Vittorio Bonaldo, was hammering iron into bed frames. He had no way of knowing that his forge would become the birthplace of one of Italy’s most celebrated furniture houses today, a brand whose tables, chairs, and sofas would one day travel from Padua to Manila, and land in the living rooms of people who simply wanted a piece of real Italian design in their homes.
This is that story: how a single craftsman’s hands built a name that, nine decades later, still defines what Italian furniture in the Philippines can look like.
Bonaldo began in 1936, when Giovanni Vittorio Bonaldo started working as a metal craftsman near Padua. He wasn’t designing furniture yet, he was shaping iron bedsteads, mesh bases, and mattress frames by hand, the way any skilled tradesman of his generation would. But in doing so, he built up something more valuable than any single product: a deep, physical knowledge of metal, how it bends, holds tension, and takes form. That know-how became the foundation where everything else was built on.
It’s a detail worth sitting with. Bonaldo didn’t just start as a design house chasing trends. It started as a craft, rooted in patience and material honesty. Values that, even now, still show up in every welded joint and sculpted leg this brand produces.
From Craft to Industry
Around twenty years later, the business began to shift when his son, Albino joined the trade. What had been a workshop producing beds and bases by hand slowly evolved into something closer to a proper manufacturer. By 1958, the company had expanded into folding beds and bases, and demand tied to changing lifestyles pushed Bonaldo to think beyond individual craftsmanship toward industrial production with the hand-finished quality that had defined it from day one. 1971, a genuine turning point: Bonaldo made its debut at the Salone del Mobile in Milan, the world’s most influential furniture fair. That single appearance moved Bonaldo from a regional metalworker into the global conversation on Italian design.
90 Years, Still an Emotional Brand
What’s remarkable about Bonaldo’s 90-year run isn’t just the longevity. It’s that the brand never settled into being safe. From bent iron bed frames to laser-cut steel tables and sculpted polycarbonate chairs, Bonaldo’s throughline has always been the same: furniture should provoke a reaction. It should be the reason you walk into a room, not just something that sits quietly in it and this is what their new collection, Architecture of Objects reminds us.
