A desk that closes around you: Busetti Garuti Redaelli

Open plan gave American offices light and took away the phone call. The answer Busetti Garuti Redaelli drew for Pedrali is a workstation wrapped by a perimeter sound-absorbing panel: an enclosed niche that protects both hearing and eyes, sized small for a quick call or full for a proper workstation, with a pop-up socket and cable access through the top. Interior Design magazine gave it a Best of Year award in 2023, two years after the same family had taken a HiP Award at NeoCon. The studio, founded in Milan in 2008, works the way engineers do — usability first, legibility second, decoration never — which is why the piece reads as furniture and behaves as acoustic equipment.

For American projects La Mercanti carries the two Pedrali collections that came out of the same drawing board, Buddy and Log: soft seating built for lobbies and lounges where conversations overlap all day.