DesignerItalian
Paola Navone
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Paola Navone was born in 1950 in Turin and trained as an architect at the Politecnico di Torino, graduating in 1973. She moved to Milan shortly after and spent the 1970s inside the beating heart of Italian radical design, collaborating with Alessandro Mendini, Ettore Sottsass, and Andrea Branzi through the Alchimia collective. That milieu was allergic to functionalist orthodoxy, and Navone absorbed its appetite for narrative, ornament, and cultural mixing - tendencies that would shape everything she made afterwards.
In 1983 she received the International Design Award in Osaka, the first time that prize was awarded, for work produced with Abet Laminati. The following years took her away from Milan's design scene entirely. From 1985 to 1988 she worked as a consultant to UNIDO and the World Bank in the Philippines and Indonesia, and she spent stretches of nearly 16 years split between Italy and Asia, much of it based in Hong Kong. That sustained immersion gave her direct fluency with Asian craft economies, textile production, and manufacturing processes that few European designers of her generation matched.
In 1988 she began her long relationship with the Friuli-based furniture maker Gervasoni, eventually becoming its artistic director. For Gervasoni she developed the Ghost collection, a family of upholstered and linen-draped furniture that became one of the defining product lines in contemporary Italian furniture. The Ghost chairs, sofas, and outdoor pieces rely on loose textile covers that blur the boundary between furniture and textile objects, giving them a quality that reads differently across climates and interiors. She has also designed for Poliform, Opinion Ciatti, EMU, Ethimo, and Natuzzi, and she oversaw the debut Armani/Casa collection.
Beyond product design, Navone has built restaurants, resorts, and retail interiors across Europe, Asia, and North America - including Point Yamu by COMO in Phuket and the Metropolitan by COMO in Miami Beach. Interior Design Magazine inducted her into its Hall of Fame in 2014. She also received Elle Decor International Design Awards in 2010-2011 and again in 2018.
On the Nordic auction market, Navone's work appears primarily through Bukowskis and Stockholms Auktionsverk. The Ghost collection dominates, with Ghost 23 chairs achieving prices between EUR 4,950 and EUR 6,800 for sets of four to six. Brass ceiling lamps for Gervasoni and the modular Ghost sofa also circulate through Swedish auction rooms, reflecting genuine collector interest in her Gervasoni pieces rather than speculative trading.