The Branko Chandelier by Visionnaire

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The company behind the Branko chandelier has a genuinely unlikely origin story for a name now associated with maximalist Italian luxury interiors. IPE was founded in 1959 in Zola Predosa, on the outskirts of Bologna, by brothers Pompeo and Vittorio Cavalli — and it started out making padded seating for Lancia cars. The name itself is an acronym: imbottiture prodotti espansi, roughly "expanded padded products," referring to the polyurethane-moulding technology the brothers were working with, which was genuinely cutting-edge for the period.

The company stayed a family-run, Bologna-based furniture maker for decades before its real transformation began in 2000, when Leopoldo Cavalli — the founders' descendant — became CEO. Under his leadership, production shifted from being entirely in-house in Bologna to being outsourced across Italy's various specialist artisan districts, each contributing the specific craft (metalwork, upholstery, woodcarving) it does best. That restructuring turned a regional family firm into a genuinely international luxury brand. In 2004, Leopoldo launched a new line alongside his sister Eleonore Cavalli, an architect who became the brand's Creative Director: Visionnaire. The line found buyers quickly across Russia, China, the US and the Middle East — markets with real appetite for the maximalist, baroque-leaning aesthetic Visionnaire built its identity on.

166 knives, one chandelier

The Branko chandelier is the clearest example of that aesthetic. Rather than the crystal or glass you'd expect from a traditional chandelier silhouette — the kind of material Scavolini's Living Crystal kitchen leans into instead — Branko is built from 166 stainless steel knives, hung in a concentric circle so the blades catch and scatter light the way facets would on a conventional piece. It keeps a recognisably classic chandelier shape — the tiered, radiating silhouette is unmistakable — while swapping out every material you'd expect for something genuinely unusual and, on paper, oddly quotidian. That contrast is the entire point: a kitchen-drawer material turned into something that reads as decadent rather than utilitarian.

It sits within Visionnaire's wider collection alongside furniture that leans on the same baroque-meets-modern instinct — dark lacquered surfaces, references to classical ornament reworked in unexpected materials, and a general refusal to do anything quietly. Branko isn't a one-off outlier within that catalogue; it's a fairly representative piece of what the brand is actually going for, the same way the Ela leather chaise longue from Giorgetti represents a century-old Italian house built on the same craft-first instinct.

The brand's reach today goes well past furniture. Visionnaire has moved into branded real estate — a genuinely large-scale example being a multi-year licensing deal signed with UAE developer Volare, worth a reported €32 million, covering "Volare by Visionnaire" ultra-luxury villa projects, with the first delivered on Jumeirah Bay Island in Dubai. That's the same maximalist design language the Branko chandelier represents, scaled up from a single lighting fixture to entire branded residences — a fairly unusual trajectory for a company that started out padding car seats sixty-odd years ago.

The two founding dates line up independently of each other, too: in 2019, IPE celebrated its 60th anniversary in the same year Visionnaire marked its 15th birthday, both during the 58th Salone Internazionale del Mobile in Milan — Italy's most significant furniture fair, and the kind of event a brand's real design-world standing gets measured against. Visionnaire's Milan flagship on Piazza Cavour runs an exhibition space it calls the "Wunderkammer" gallery, which has hosted everything from an archive show of the company's own 1970s armchairs to, in 2022, its first NFT project — a digital piece titled "Apollo Belvedere," shown during the fair's 60th edition.

A company that still makes both

What's easy to miss is that IPE Visionnaire didn't abandon its origins to get here — the group's underlying expertise in padding, upholstery and moulded construction (the exact skills the Cavalli brothers built the company on for Lancia in 1959) is still what makes pieces like Branko possible technically, even though the finished product has nothing visually in common with a 1960s car seat. It's a genuinely unusual through-line for a luxury lighting brand: most don't start in automotive upholstery.

A piece like Branko isn't built for a hallway or a modest dining room — it needs the kind of double-height entrance, formal dining room or statement stairwell where a genuinely large chandelier has room to be seen from more than one angle, and where 166 individually hung blades won't just read as clutter overhead. It's a piece bought to be the first thing a room says about itself, which is exactly the design brief the whole Visionnaire line is built around — the same instinct behind PlumeBlanche's diamond-encrusted leather sofa, a different country and material entirely, and the Barcelona chair, built on that same formal, built-to-be-seen presence.