Danish architect Stine Gam and Italian architect Enrico Fratesi are the creative minds behind Copengahen-based studio GamFratesi. Their work combines classic Danish and Italian conceptual design: "From this cross-cultural substrate they create furniture that respectfully reflects tradition while also featuring unique embedded stories, symbols and associations, often expressed in a minimalist idiom." The enveloping Haiku is a perfect example of this simplicity.

1. Haiku for Fredericia

Another piece with a protective shell, Rewrite is a desk that reinterprets the classic library carrel, a piece of furniture meant to provide individual space within a larger setting. The wool fabric covering the shell also recalls the hushed silence of libraries.

2. Rewrite for Ligne Roset

GamFratesi's evocative shapes are at work in their lighting designs as well, which employ simple forms. Whether desk or suspension, Cheshire, for example, can be distilled into geometry-dome, line, and circle in this case.

3. Cheshire for Fontana Arte

I imagine that Gam and Fratesi like ritual, because they have fashioned beautiful pieces that belong in the dressing room. Traveller offers a comfortable place to sit or rest while also providing "a trestle structure in black painted metal used as a support to covers and clothes."

4. Traveller for Porro

For smaller spaces, Compass is a clothes valet inspired by the "striking elements of the object." The compass is the object here, reduced into graphic circles and lines.

5. Compass for Casamania

GamFratesi's Bauhaus-inspired mobile table emphasizes circular shapes by enlarging the wheels. And the metal structure doubles as a handle, in keeping with utilitarian ideals.

6. Chariot for Casamania

Maintaining the GTV brand's bent wood and woven cane elements, Targa is a group of lounge chairs and sofas continuing the GamFratesi preoccupation with furniture that encircles the user. Ellipsoidal and encompassing.

7. Targa for Gebrüder Thonet Vienna GmbH (GTV)

More shapes are on display in Balance, an acoustical, modular screen system that hangs from the ceiling in the tradition of Alexander Calder mobiles. Add or subtract textile "petals" to change configurations.

8. Balance for Cappellini

We must end with the Beetle Chair, which is all about structure. In all its incarnations-upholstered or not, in dining and lounge versions-this might just be The Chair of 2017. Seen here and there and just about everywhere, Beetle Chair is based on beetle anatomy, featuring a beetle's sections: shape, shells, sutures, rigid outside, and soft inside. Proof that biophilic design is alive and well.

9. Beetle Chair for Gubi

For more information, visit www.gamfratesi.com.