UNTITLED [LV]

UNTITLED [LV] is a minimalist coffee table created by Milan and New York-based designer Pietro Franceschini as part of Interval in this year’s Collectible Design Fair in New York City. Interval operates as a design collective that has reimagined the very notion of permanence in contemporary practice, conceived as a platform that activates at its own rhythm – appearing and disappearing with deliberate intent rather than following conventional exhibition cycles. Founded by designers Alban Roger, Arthur Vallin, Maurizio Bianchi Mattioli, Monica Sordo, and Pietro Franceschini, the collective explores moments of convergence rather than continuity, treating each presentation as a distinct temporal and spatial event shaped by its specific context and atmosphere.

For UNTITLED [LV], the work emerges from Franceschini’s ongoing investigation into what he calls emotional architecture, where objects become vessels for psychological states rather than mere functional forms. At 170 centimeters in length yet only 26 centimeters deep, the piece stretches across space with deliberate contradiction – monumentally present yet impossibly slim, like a horizon line made tangible. The proportions speak to a kind of minimalist defiance, rejecting the conventional coffee table’s invitation to gather and instead proposing solitude as a design principle.

Franceschini achieves this tension through what appears deceptively simple: a few deliberate cuts in stainless steel that transform industrial material into something approaching sculpture. The fabrication process, executed by GOLAA in the Dominican Republic, requires eight weeks of careful manipulation to achieve the piece’s paradoxical character – simultaneously brutal and refined. The satin finish softens the steel’s inherent aggression while preserving its industrial honesty, creating a surface that invites touch even as the form maintains distance.

The coffee table’s placement within Interval’s cinematic living room at COLLECTIBLE Art Fair proves especially resonant. Surrounded by the collective’s carefully curated domestic fragments – the vintage television, the paused drink, the surveillance camera – Franceschini’s piece becomes both anchor and enigma. It grounds the space while simultaneously questioning the very notion of gathering, offering a surface that seems to reject the casual intimacy typically associated with coffee tables.

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