Fifty years after Vittorio Livi bet an entire company on curved glass, FIAM Italia is still rewriting what the material can do, and in Western Australia, that history belongs exclusively to Ultimo Interiors.
WORDS ELIZABETH CLARKE
Vittorio Livi could have hedged his bets. Instead, in 1973, he built an entire company around one material – glass – and bet that curved sheets of it could carry the whole weight of a furniture brand. More than fifty years on, FIAM Italia keeps finding ways to make glass behave against type, trading its usual transparency and weightlessness for something with texture, depth and real character. In WA, the brand is exclusive to Ultimo Interiors.
Decades of experimentation have given FIAM a level of technical mastery few can match, from bending sheet glass into gentle curves to fusing it at high temperatures. The company's DV-Glass® process is the clearest expression of this – a patented technique that layers multiple sheets of glass into a single body, producing thicknesses and visual depth that shouldn't really be possible from a material this thin.
At the heart of FIAM's approach is the idea of sculpting with glass – treating it less as a surface or structural component and more like a material to be shaped, carved, layered and composed. That sensibility connects FIAM's furniture to the wider history of glass as an art form, including the work of celebrated American glass artist Danny Lane, whose architectural approach to the material has similarly explored its weight, strength, texture and sculptural potential. It is this tension between fragility and force that gives FIAM's pieces their distinctive presence.
"Dedication and specialisation deliver ground-breaking results," says Ultimo Interiors managing director Enzo Sberna. "FIAM’s focus on glass-bending has produced remarkable results time and again. Its expertise in the process has attracted some of the world’s leading architects and designers, who have sought to translate their ideas through FIAM’s unique production capabilities."
FIAM's history reads like a who's who of people willing to push a difficult material somewhere new – Ron Arad, Rodolfo Dordoni, Daniel Libeskind and Vico Magistretti. Marcel Wanders’ POP collection takes glass in a more playful direction, drawing on the exuberance of music and fashion, while Philippe Starck’s Caadre mirror and the structurally bold Ragno table sit at the more architectural end of FIAM’s design language.
But nothing sits quite where the Ghost armchair does. Designed by Cini Boeri in 1987, it's a single sheet of curved glass bent into the shape of a chair, with no frame, no joints, nothing hidden. It remains one of the more startling pieces of twentieth-century design, and it now lives in the permanent collection of MoMA in New York.
"The Ghost chair is an exercise in single-material, single-form design – a concept that has challenged designers for decades," says Enzo. "It is more than a covetable piece; it is a sculptural form worthy of a museum. Made famous by a Mel B cover shoot in the nineties and featured in countless shoots since, it is a striking example of engineering and material working in harmony."
For Milan Design Week 2026, FIAM presented its newest collection in a dedicated exhibition on Via Larga where the range treats glass as landscape, image and sculpture. Still, a mirror by Controvento under Gabriele Chiave's creative direction, takes its cue from the stillness of alpine lakes, its surface holding the memory of movement. Istante, from Gupica, borrows the logic of Polaroid photography, its textured frame built to deepen the glass rather than simply reflect it. Francesca Lanzavecchia's Ogiva table system nods to the pointed arch, glass fusion capturing light while glimpses of metal structure appear and vanish depending on where you stand. Elsewhere, Simone Bonanni's Brenta chair marks his third collaboration with the brand, and Arik Levy's Asteroids coffee table reads closer to cosmic geology than furniture, its glass supports standing like monoliths rather than legs.
"The latest collection from FIAM is truly expansive, and the strength of its evolution inspired us to dedicate Australia’s first FIAM Italia Studio at Ultimo," Enzo explains. "The new lighting collection and finishes for sculptural mirrors and cabinetry are exquisite pieces in their own right. As the market rediscovers glass in new ways, we have positioned Ultimo to showcase these possibilities to our clients, dedicating an area of the showroom to glass innovation."
Fifty years in, the company still hasn't settled on a final answer for what glass can be – which is, if nothing else, an unusually good position for a furniture brand to be in.
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