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In a former silk mill in Como, Draga Obradovic and Aurel K. Basedow have spent nearly twenty years stripping old furniture to the bone and dressing it again in resin, cement, lacquer and colour.
Start with a nineteenth-century armchair. Strip away the upholstery, the stuffing and the manners until only the skeleton is left, then look hard at the bones. That, more or less, is how Draga & Aurel, the Como studio of Draga Obradovic and Aurel K. Basedow, has begun almost everything since 2007, and it explains why its first collection was called Deshabillé. Furniture, caught half undressed.
A painter, a textile designer, a restorer, a drummer and a hermit walk into a silk mill. It sounds like the start of a joke, but it is a fairly accurate headcount of the studio. Draga is Serbian, schooled at the Belgrade Painting Academy and the Florence Academy of Fine Arts before a spell designing textiles for fashion. Aurel is German, trained at the Milan Academy of Fine Arts, then restored, drummed and lived for a time as a hermit. He has never once stopped painting. They met in Italy, settled first in Florence, then moved north to Como and a former silk mill, and called the studio Atelier Symbiosis. Hard to argue with the name.
Como knows a thing or two about pattern, dye and the slow business of layering colour onto something beautiful. The couple seem to have absorbed it through the walls.
Deshabillé dressed its stripped-back nineteenth-century seats in a fresh skin of contemporary graphics and knowing, layered wear, so the old frame and the new surface hold a conversation you can follow from across the room. Heritage (2009) turned to the mid-century, and here the furniture acquired names along with new lives. The Gregor, Dorothea and Nora drawers were reworked through silkscreen and resin, Nora finished with multi-coloured lacquered fronts that would cheer the gloomiest hallway in Europe. Every piece a one-off, every piece wearing its history in plain sight. We have a soft spot for that sort of thing. It is exactly what we look for in the little places we feature.
That same year, Milan Design Week brought a meeting with Baxter, and with it the leap into serial production. The traffic ran both ways. Baxter embraced printed leathers and poured resin for limited editions; the duo found an international audience in high-end design, while the vintage revivals carried on happily in the workshop.
Then came the resin, and things turned luminous. Transparency Matters, an eleven-piece capsule shown at the Salone del Mobile in 2019 and later at NOMAD St. Moritz, reads like a mood board assembled by a very well-read magpie: minimalism, space-age futurism, 1970s op art, brutalist marriages of resin and cement, and Paco Rabanne's fluid metal garments. Clear, glowing and frank about how it was made, the collection treats its title as a personal philosophy as much as a material fact. Colour leads; light does the rest. You could fairly say they draw with it.
Back in the silk mill, Aurel's drum kit keeps company with prototypes and canvases. His paintings, revived with real force since 2015, are thick with layered matter, vintage figures half swallowed by paint. It is the furniture process conducted on canvas: something old revealed and buried in the same gesture. Design and art share the floor here, and neither seems in any hurry to leave. The couple's own summary is the best one: "While we search for one result, we end up with another, more exciting."
Their gallery list reads like a guest book for design's most discerning coolcats. Galleria Rossana Orlandi has shown them since 2020, with new chapters of Transparency Matters alongside Aurel's abstracts and unique Heritage pieces. Nina Yashar's Nilufar launched Candy Box in 2022, resin as joyful as a sweet shop window. Todd Merrill flies the flag in America and took their Flare lucite to Design Miami. And from 2025, Collectional carries exclusive pieces to Dubai Design Week, vintage allure finished with a little luxury.
Strip it all back, as they would, and the skeleton is simple. Craft is something you inherit and then keep reinventing. In a Como silk mill, somewhere between the drum kit and the resin pours, Draga & Aurel have been doing exactly that for nearly twenty years. Long may the furniture keep undressing.
Explore the collections at draga-aurel.com.
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Get the insider news and lowdown on what we've been up to, where we've been, and who we've met along the way. Be the first to discover new places and get the scoop on our favourites.