Strips Sofa by Arflex in Milan — Official Retailer

There are sofas that furnish a room and sofas that changed the way upholstered furniture is conceived. The Strips sofa by Arflex, designed by Cini Boeri in the Seventies, belongs to the second category: a museum piece that was nonetheless born to be lived in every day. We at Mariani, official Arflex retailers in Milan and Arluno, tell its story here — and, even better, we let you try it in the showroom.

The story: Cini Boeri and a revolutionary idea

The Strips system was born in 1972 from a design by Cini Boeri, one of the great protagonists of Italian design, for Arflex — the Brianza company that has worked with the best designers since 1947. The intuition is simple and, for its time, disruptive: treating the sofa's cover as a quilt, a soft envelope that wraps the padding like a sleeping bag or a duvet, and that can be slipped off completely.

At a time when sofas were formal, rigid, "untouchable" objects, Strips proposed the opposite: informal comfort, declared softness, genuine domestic practicality. Recognition arrived in 1979, when the design won the Compasso d'Oro ADI, the most authoritative prize in Italian design. Since then Strips has never gone out of production and has entered the collections of design museums — confirmation of an iconic status that few upholstered pieces can claim.

The features: fully removable cover and informal comfort

What makes Strips different from any other sofa? First of all its completely removable cover: the whole quilt comes off easily, with no complicated disassembly. It's a quality that makes an enormous difference over time — for maintenance, for hygiene, for the possibility of refreshing the sofa by changing the cover instead of changing the sofa.

Then there's the seat: generous, enveloping, with a deliberately informal comfort. Strips invites you to sit down without ceremony, to use the sofa as a place in the home rather than a display piece. The duvet-effect quilt, with its soft stitched surface, gives the volume an immediately recognisable character: you can spot it at a glance in any interior, from Milanese apartments to country houses.

• Completely and easily removable quilted cover — revolutionary at the time, extremely practical today
• Informal, welcoming comfort with a soft, deep seat
• Design by Cini Boeri, awarded the Compasso d'Oro ADI in 1979
• In production for over fifty years: an investment that never goes out of style
• Exhibited in design museums: an internationally recognised icon

The variants: sofas, armchair and bed

Strips isn't a single sofa but a complete family. The system includes sofas in different sizes and compositions, the armchair and the bed, all sharing the same removable quilted cover. This lets you bring the same idea — and the same aesthetic coherence — into the living room as well as the bedroom.

Why buy it from Mariani

A sofa like Strips deserves to be chosen well: composition, size, upholstery. We at Mariani have been furnishing homes since 1928 and we are an official Arflex retailer in Milan and Arluno: that means access to the full catalogue — not just what's on display — the official warranty and support that continues well beyond the order.

• Official Arflex retailer: full catalogue, warranty, real configurations and fabric samples to touch
• Physical showrooms in Milan San Babila and Arluno: a sofa should be tried, not imagined
• VR previews: we can show you Strips placed in your own living room, at real scale, before you buy
• Delivery and assembly by our in-house team, never subcontractors: the piece reaches your home followed by the same hands from start to finish
• The option to set Strips into a complete, turn-key interior design project

If you'd like to explore the brand further, we've written about where to see and try Arflex in Milan and dedicated a page to Cini Boeri and her designs for Arflex. And if the soft, modular style wins you over, it's worth discovering the Marenco sofa by Mario Marenco too, the other great Arflex icon of the Seventies.

Frequently asked questions about the Strips sofa

Where to find us: showrooms and opening hours

Arflex is one of the brands we represent, alongside FLOS, Zanotta, Cattelan Italia, FIAM Italia, Glas Italia and over fifty Italian and international brands. For any question about Strips — lead times, fabrics, compositions — we're here.