The petineuse stands on four tapered solid wood legs, tied together by a Y-shaped central stretcher that stabilises the piece. The front develops along a sinuous line, with the two side drawers set back from the central drawer to form a concavity at the middle of the cabinet, where the user sits. Above the top, a shield-shaped tilting mirror is mounted on its own independent base and rises with a shaped profile: the upper sides curve inward until they meet in a small central dip, a silhouette that is a recurring signature in Paolo Buffa's vocabulary. The proportions are compact, intended for a private dressing room, but the scale of the mirror gives the piece a decisive vertical presence.
The cabinet is in solid cherry wood, with the top and sides veneered in book-matched cherry. The Y-stretcher below is in turned wood, slender, read as a structural gesture. The two side drawer fronts are faced in rose-dyed linen, hand-painted with a decorative motif of stars, comets and a ringed planet in ivory tones; at the centre of each front, a spherical wooden pull in dark lacquered finish. The central drawer, deeper, is instead in figured cherry with a key lock and framed by a thin moulding. The mirror is bevelled along its entire perimeter and held in a cherry frame that repeats its shaped profile. The interior of the drawers is left in visible wood.
Paolo Buffa is one of the central figures in Italian interior design of the 1940s and 1950s, active in Milan as an architect of interiors and designer of furniture for the high bourgeois clientele, with a language that works on refined proportions, precious timbers and calibrated decorative detail. Petineuses are a recurring chapter in his bedroom production, conceived as signature pieces scaled for the master bedroom or a lady's dressing room; Buffa often entrusted the decoration of drawer fronts to collaborating artists, and the painted linen panels with figurative or abstract motifs are a recognisable hallmark of his work in this decade. The shield-shaped mirror with central dip is a motif that Buffa declines in successive variants on mirrors, headboards and upholstered pieces, and it recurs within the stylistic dialogue with Gio Ponti and with Melchiorre Bega's Quadrante.
Professionally restored by our in-house atelier. The cherry wood has been cleaned and refinished while retaining the original patina. The painted textile on the drawer fronts is the original one, and carries some marks of time in the form of slight yellowing and small surface wear, which have been stabilised rather than redone. The structure is sound, the drawers run smoothly, and the original key is present and working. The mirror is intact, with minor edge oxidation consistent with age.
Cabinet dimensions: Height 77.5 cm (30.5 in) x Width 111 cm (43.7 in) x Depth 52 cm (20.5 in)
Total height with mirror: 140 cm (55.1 in)
Mirror dimensions: Height 62.5 cm (24.6 in) x Width 49 cm (19.3 in)
