Miguel Milá and Gonzalo Milá create Harpo

Santa & Cole’s new street furniture designed for a globalised, 21st-century world.

Designers Miguel Milá y Gonzalo Milá — a father-and-son team — have collaborated once again, this time creating their Harpo family of street furniture comprising a bench with a backrest, one without and a chair — all inspired by Harpo Marx, the most mischievous of the Marx Brothers. 

Santa & Cole set the duo, who are well-known designers of modern street furniture, the challenge of creating seating intended for the international, 21st-century market, which could be flat-packed and easily transported. The collection also needed to exude a multicultural quality, be comfortable and capable of being produced at a reasonable cost using local materials. The resulting collection, Harpo — the world’s first truly global street furniture line — is easy to assemble and disassemble, economical and very comfortable. It’s available in a warm version with slats made of European or tropical wood certified by the Forest Stewardship Council  (FSC) — which promotes responsible management of forests — or in lighter, anodised aluminium.

Santa & Cole has been making modern outdoor and indoor lighting and street furniture since 1985. Many of its pieces have been created by these two designers who, as father and son, represent two generations of Spanish design. Father Miguel has created lighting and such examples of street furniture as the NeoRomántico bench for Santa & Cole, which has also reissued some of his lighting designs, such as his iconic TMC light, which won an ADI-FAD Delta de Oro prize in 1961. Meanwhile, his son Gonzalo, who founded his own studio in 2001, has collaborated with Santa & Cole’s design and manufacturing departments, creating, for example, the Rama family of street lighting, which scooped the ADI-FAD Delta de Plata prize in 2001. Both designers collaborated for the first time when they co-created Santa & Cole’s Amigo ceiling light in 2009.