Where Stone Meets Sound: Antolini x Bang & Olufsen
A year after Beosound Balance Natura turned heads at Milan Design Week 2025, Bang & Olufsen and Antolini returned with something more ambitious. The collaboration made its public debut at Milan Design Week 2026, hosted at the Antolini MilanoDuomo Stoneroom in Piazza Fontana, built on a simple premise: sound and stone are rarely designed together, but they should be.
Visitors crossed a symbolic threshold, leaving the noise of Milan behind for a contemporary reinterpretation of a garden. Greenery enveloped the space, drawing visitors toward a reflective water table where falling droplets sent ripples across the surface, sound made visible. The result is a composition where acoustic performance and material design coexist rather than compete, extending Antolini's expertise from interiors into outdoor environments, where natural stone shapes atmosphere, texture, and emotional depth as much as any speaker shapes sound.
Bang & Olufsen Brings the Outdoors Inside at Milan Design Week
Bang & Olufsen Brings the Outdoors Inside at Milan Design Week
At the centre of the installation sat the preview of Beosound Haven, Bang & Olufsen's forthcoming landscape speaker, presented in both freestanding and wall-mounted forms to suit different outdoor settings. Through B&O's Atelier programme, aluminium, the brand's signature material, is sculpted into Haven's distinctive sphere form and paired with Antolini's natural stone, specifically Taj Mahal quartzite in a matt finish, chosen for its soft tonality and refined texture. Kresten Bjørn Krab-Bjerre, Bang & Olufsen's Senior Director of Design, described the thinking behind it: sound treated as part of the landscape itself rather than an object placed within it, meant to enhance atmosphere rather than demand attention.
The collaboration also extends to a limited series of B&O's iconic Beolab 18 speakers, each reimagined through Antolini's natural stone in matt finish: Amazonite, Retro Black Petrified Wood, Patagonia Original, Dalmata, Cipollino Grey Wave, and Taj Mahal. Every piece is unique, defined by the individual character of the stone selected, no two identical.
It's a fitting pairing on paper as much as in the flesh. Bang & Olufsen, founded in Denmark in 1925 and marking its centenary this past year, has built its reputation on treating sound as design rather than electronics. Antolini, a family-owned Italian company with 70 years of expertise sourcing and crafting marble and natural stone, brings the same conviction to material. Neither brand does anything by half measures, and the installation reads as a genuine meeting of equals rather than a branding exercise.
As Carlo Alberto Antolini put it:
"In collaboration with Bang & Olufsen, we have moved beyond traditional design to embrace the open air. By blending the raw elegance of natural stone with precision sound, we have created a bridge between nature and technology. These landscape speakers are not just objects. They are a dialogue between the elements, transforming gardens and terraces into living galleries where history and avant-garde meet to host your most meaningful moments."
Antolini and Bang & Olufsen debuted the Beosound Haven speaker at Milan design week
The design combines aluminium with stone supports
At PietraCasa, Antolini natural stone is available to specify for your project. Contact our studio at studio@pietracasa.uk to discuss options for indoor and outdoor applications.