There is nothing wrong with an IKEA bookcase until there is. The Billy works for a few hundred paperbacks at the start of your bookshelf life. Then the shelves bow under your hardbacks, the paper foil edges start to lift, and you notice the same unit in three friends’ flats. That is the point where…

Around 48.6 million tonnes of furniture are thrown out worldwide every year, most of it pressed wood that ends in landfill after five or six years. An Italian-made bookshelf sits at the other end of that scale: steel, a proper finish, an invisible bracket you’ll never see, and a price tag that asks more from you on…

‘Italian designer’ has become a marketing shortcut for anything that looks sleek and costs more than the high-street alternative. The label sticks because it carries two real industrial traditions: a school of design that came out of post-war Milan, and a steel industry centred on Brescia that still leads European production today.