Serena Chair is a minimalist seating object designed by Paris-based designer Borg & Hultén for Giustini / Stagetti, realized in hand-forged burnished stainless steel. Stainless steel rarely behaves with warmth – its industrial associations run deep, from the brutalist column to the commercial kitchen. The burnished version of Derville’s Serena Chair works against this expectation. Hand-forging introduces variation into the surface that machine finishing cannot replicate, and burnishing deepens this further: the metal takes on a matte luminosity, absorbing rather than reflecting light. The result sits closer to ancient bronze or darkened iron than to the polished steel of modernist furniture, a material register that invites touch rather than deflecting it.
Derville’s design sensibility orbits a productive tension between opposing cultural poles. Her references span Jean-Michel Frank’s austere luxury and Donald Judd’s serial minimalism, the civic grandeur of the Florentine Renaissance and the restrained elegance of Swedish Grace, with Josef Hoffmann’s Viennese geometry and Emilio Terry’s surrealist classicism folded into the mix. The Serena Chair does not resolve this tension so much as hold it. The hand-forged steel carries the mark of the craftsman’s process, aligning with decorative arts traditions, while the chair’s form maintains the economy of line associated with 20th-century modernism.
Her seven years working alongside Pierre Yovanovitch shaped her understanding of how materials perform within interior spaces at the highest level of residential design. Coordinating complex projects across multiple continents – working between architects, craftsmen, and gallerists – trained an instinct for how a single object must carry weight within a broader spatial argument. The Serena Chair reflects this experience. It reads as a piece designed for the considered interior rather than the trade floor.
