• The Fifties: the adventure of Italian design begins, beautiful and useful things for everybody

    Architects and designers discover the furniture industry. A true revolution begins in the kitchen: with the first furnishings in series and the first electrical appliances, it becomes modular and compact. Plastic laminate is established as a valuable new industrial product and accepted in all levels of society as a sign of modernism.

  • Arpa Industriale starts its operations in Bra

  • The Sixties: mass consumption takes off

    In response to new needs for practicality and comfort, a creative culture develops integrating the elegance of form with the functional necessities of the modern family. Furniture’s colours and shapes evolve quickly: from the traditional dark and light browns, they move to pastel colours, then to the black and white of Opt Art. The Arpa catalogue includes 50 different decors.

  • The Seventies: imagination rules; Italian design is at the height of creativity

    Homes become an explosion of chromaticism, fluorescent variations, geometric designs. Decorations change the look but and meaning of objects. Colours, materials and surfaces add structure to rooms, send off strong signals, and communicate their identity. Arpa’s offerings expand again: they quickly reach 100 decors, with six available finishes.

  • First Italian subsidiary: Pesaro

  • Surface finishes for high endurance (ERRE)

  • The Eighties: it is time to experiment

    Industrial design becomes a driver, and household furnishings are an extraordinary tool for the avant-garde. The domestic landscape is populated with totem objects, with bold colour schemes that meet emotional needs before they meet functional needs. Arpa’s offerings and capacity grow exponentially, not only in finishes and decors (more than doubled) but especially in innovations of types and materials.

  • Postforming: bendable HPL for the furniture industry

  • Unicolor: plain colour melamine laminate

  • The Nineties: confronting a new minimalism of lines and shapes with aspirations of eco-sustainability

    Increasingly frequent contact across different cultures brings Arpa to explore new solutions to the problems of living, while a new need for personalisation and identity affirmation leads the way.

  • Installed incinerator with energy recovery and controlled emissions in real time

  • Freestanding HPL with black core

  • First European subsidiary: Arpa France

  • Personalised HPL with digital transfer technique

  • Building Grade: high-endurance HPL for external uses

  • The new millennium: the pursuit of quality and sustainability

    The home expresses the complexity, the contrasts and the multiplicity of tastes and cultures of contemporary living. A mixture of styles predominates. Lively colours, unusual materials, and new finishes are sought after. The fusion style triumphs. A growing sensitivity to the environment steers research to sustainable production.

  • Arpa Creativity begins: a project in synergy with architects and designers

  • First non-European subsidiary: Arpa USA

  • EN 438 update

    The strength of pressure used in Arpa’s production cycle, in order to maintain high standards of quality, is up to 60% greater than required by the standards.

  • Adoption of the Code of Ethics

  • Creation of the S.H.E. Department: Safety, Health, Environment

  • Our times - the multi-sensory experience - there is no homogeneity of styles, nor is there a rigid division of spaces in traditional settings. 

    Living space must be welcoming and elicit emotions and sensations. The kitchen, for example, is no longer only a place to cook food, but a warm and social space, a place to experience companionship.

    Additionally, materials become smart: Arpa researchers develop FENIX NTM®, an innovative material for interior design applications, made with nanotechnologies.

  • Arpa for the Kitchen: the first collection for this specific application

  • New showrooms open: New York and Barcelona, Arpa in Bra and Pesaro

  • Arpa for You: a collection of 311 decors in thin HPL, all with rapid delivery

  • Naturalia: a compact, eco-sustainable material

  • Silverlam: a ground-breaking HPL able to deter the growth of bacteria on surfaces

  • Athlon: a collection of decorative HPL panels in a high thickness with a fast delivery service

  • FENIX NTM®: extremely opaque innovative material for interior design

  • FENIX NTA®: an empowered metal surface

  • BLOOM: a new core technology for Arpa HPL and FENIX NTM®