Gio Ponti Ribbed Sideboard, Italy, 1940s

Design
1940s

Manufacture
1940-1949

Location
Lonigo, IT

Gio Ponti ribbed sideboard, wood and brass, Italy, 1940s

Two pairs of bi-fold doors front this sideboard, each cut the full height with fine vertical ribbing and hung on a concealed brass hinge mechanism. A brass oval-ring key locks each pair, set into a brass escutcheon plate at the top corner of the door. Behind the doors, the interior is finished in pale birch, with adjustable shelving on either side and a bank of two drawers built with dovetailed joinery, their fronts shaped into a hand pull rather than fitted with applied hardware. The case tapers down into slender legs finished with brass cone-shaped sabots, a detail that lifts the sideboard's visual weight against its long horizontal proportions.

That contrast, a solid run of ribbed doors set on a base that looks almost too fine for the job, is characteristic of the language Gio Ponti developed for Italian cabinetry through the 1940s. He returned often to this pairing of substantial casework with slender, tapered supports and small brass accents, letting the base carry a lightness the case itself doesn't have. The sideboard follows that same instinct, and it reads as a considered exercise in proportion typical of his postwar domestic furniture.