About Tonelli

Barker and Stonehouse is one of the Tonelli furniture stockist is the north of England. Our expert sales staff are regularly updated with information directly from Tonelli respresentatives, so they have all the information to help you with your purchase.

Tonelli manufactures furnishing items and designer objects in glass.
The company was founded in the mid-1980s and is the result of a deep and lasting passion for research and experimentation.

Tradition and technology have been brought together to forge a company philosophy, the very heart of which is based on the value given to design, and therefore, to the deisgner, when it comes to enhancing the characteristics of this unique element: glass.

Tonelli’s story beganmore than 20 years ago, when the first steps were being made in welding together flat sheets of crystal glass using a structural bonding agent. Until that time, glass was only used in the furnishing industry in the form of flat sheets or connected to other elements by means of visible metal joints. The results of early experiments in this new technique stood out like a small Copernican revolution.
And it was at this point that our tecnhology began.

Glass has been with us for more than five thousand years.

Glass is the element that Tonelli has inherited from tradition.

It is one of the oldest, most fascinating materials that the history of mankind has to offer. Glass is fragile yet resistant, solid yet light, beautiful and at the same time, functional. Over the years, it has been able to keep all of its charm and extraordinarily eclectic qualities intact.
From the Syrian pearls of 5,000 BC to the heat shields of 21st-century space vehicles, the magical perfection of glass remains the same. Ampoules from Mesopotamia, Roman containers, Byzantine glass, objects from Venice and Bohemia, the works of Tiffany and Galle', and the architecture of Gropius and Le Corbusier are just some of more admirable metamorphoses of glass.

Traditionally glass was worked using a complex series of operations: firing up to 1500 degrees centigrade then cooling for the forming, casting, moulding, lamination and drawing stages.
Then, thanks to the so-called floating process invented at the Pilkington Brothers glass works, all of these stages were brought together into a single automated process that could produce an infinite number of glass sheets with varying thickness and of notable length.