Table Talk

Gae Aulenti's 1965 marble Jumbo table still has outsize appeal

- HANNAH MARTIN

Whatever you design, whether it is an interior, a piece of furniture, or merely a stage set, must always contain the promise of a whole city," the Italian architect Gae Aulenti told Architectural Digest for a story about her Milanese apartment in 1990.

By that point, she had turned a train station in Paris into the Musée d'Orsay, designed galleries at the Centre Pompidou, and restored the Palazzo Grassi in Venice. But in 1965, after a 10-year stint crafting the visual identity of Casabella magazine, she was still working on a smaller scale-creating residential interiors and furniture to inhabit them.