by Cecilia Moltani
A story of family, vision and creativity. What sets the Friulian company founded by Paolo Vernier apart is its belief that design is a wonderful life – a philosophy that turns everyday gestures into meaningful experiences.
Design is a wonderful life. This is the motto that captures the very essence of Midj, the Friulian company founded by designer and entrepreneur Paolo Vernier together with his wife, Roberta. Since 1987, Midj has been producing tables, chairs, sofas, bookcases, lighting, and accessories, blending artisanal craftsmanship with a vision constantly oriented toward the future.
For Midj, design is above all an act of freedom – the freedom to shape individuality through form and material. It is a continuous pursuit of improvement, of greater efficiency and refined quality. An approach essential to a world in constant flux – and one that has made it much more than a furniture brand. It is, instead, a workshop in perpetual evolution: a place where design is both culture and daily practice, and where the future is always an open project.
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Paolo Vernier © Midj
Production department © Midj
Miriam and Rudy Vernier © Midj
Production department © Midj
Leather cutting department © Midj
Cutting department © Midj
Production department © Midj
Leather cutting department © Midj
Production department
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Born in 1946, Paolo Vernier began designing chairs at a young age, learning early on how to translate ideas into tangible forms. Every imperfection or technical flaw became an opportunity to improve, to refine the process, and to find ever more ingenious solutions – an attitude that became part of Midj’s DNA. Today, his children Miriam and Rudy carry forward this legacy, adapting it to contemporary challenges. If the postwar generation – the visionary entrepreneurs who helped define the early days of made in Italy – focused on growth and expansion, today’s challenge is a different one: to prioritize quality over quantity, durability over excess, and thoughtful selection over the production frenzy that characterized the past decades.
Production department © Midj
Production takes place entirely at the company’s headquarters in Cordovado, in the province of Pordenone. Here, every stage – from prototyping to final assembly – is managed internally, in a virtuous balance between artisanal skill and advanced technology.
But what does it truly mean to unite an industrial dimension with a craft-based soul? For Midj, it means combining traditional manufacturing with Industry 4.0 machinery and lean production principles. This integration preserves the manual expertise, attention to detail, and Italian craftsmanship that define the company – while embedding them in a modern, efficient industrial system.
Another key driver of the brand’s innovation lies in its collaborations with internationally renowned designers. Figures such as Paola Navone, Giulio Iacchetti, Franco Poli, Karim Rashid, Roberto Paoli, and Studio Pastina bring cross-disciplinary perspectives, visionary thinking, and an inventive energy that continually broaden the company’s creative horizons.
Officina delle Idee department © Midj
Fueling this ongoing evolution is the Officina delle Idee – the company’s creative hub. In its 500-square-meter space, designers’ creativity meets artisanal intelligence. Each project is born from a precise balance between tradition and modernity, blending handcrafting techniques with digital innovation to achieve meticulous attention to every detail.
The Officina delle Idee is a place where ideas meet skill, where intuition challenges technology. It is a space that embraces experimentation – where taking risks, exploring new directions, and even making mistakes are all part of the creative journey. Because it is precisely through trials and errors that prototypes become successful products.
This is where Midj’s commitment to the culture of design takes shape: through dialogue, research, and innovation that lead to collections both unique and timeless. The company’s dedication has earned numerous international accolades, including the Good Design Award, the German Design Award, the Red Dot Award, and inclusion in the ADI Design Index.
Leather cutting department © Midj
What truly sets Midj apart is not only the quality of its products but its ability to transform design into a genuine way of life. This philosophy is encapsulated in the brand’s manifesto – Design is a wonderful life – which expresses the company’s deepest essence: designing to improve quality of life, to enhance the beauty of everyday gestures, and to enrich spaces with intelligent, meaningful solutions.
Design is above all a mindset – a creative instinct, an attitude that drives the cultivation of ideas, nurturing them until they bloom. Every project is conceived to make daily living more comfortable, harmonious, and human, even in its simplest expressions.
Every Midj object reflects the sensibility and experience of those who imagined, designed, and crafted it: fragments of life, reading, encounters, and visions that intertwine to form a design both personal and authentic. Because to design, ultimately, is to live freely – to give form to one’s own uniqueness.
Ideas are the driving force behind every project. Italy has always been a land of creativity and ingenuity, and Midj continues this legacy through constant exploration of new solutions that respond to the present and anticipate the future. A clear example of this foresight is the company’s early intuition of the outdoor living trend. Even before the pandemic, the italian company had begun reimagining exterior spaces as a natural extension of the home, developing outdoor collections that would later prove strikingly ahead of their time.
Production department © Midj
As László Moholy-Nagy wrote in Vision in Motion (1947): “Design is not a profession but an attitude.” These words perfectly capture Midj’s spirit – design as an organic process that unites aesthetics, function, and meaning. Not merely a matter of form, but a discipline that designs relationships, transforming materials, spaces, and habits into experiences.
In this vision, design is a fluid, inclusive, and synergistic practice that bridges technical precision and humanistic sensitivity. One doesn’t design to sell – one designs to live. What truly matters is the emotional and symbolic value that every object creates for its user. A chair, therefore, is never just a chair. What matters is its idea – its drawing, its silhouette, the meaning it carries through time, and the joy of encountering it, day after day, in one’s own home.
