Milan 2015: beaver fur and hand-stitched leather cover the familiar forms of gym apparatus in this furniture and lighting collection influenced by body-building culture (+ slideshow).

Milanese designer Alberto Biagetti and artist Laura Baldassari have reinterpreted well-known pieces of exercise apparatus as home furnishings, encouraging users to indulge in inactivity instead of building up a sweat.

The Body Building collection includes an exercise ball covered in navy blue beaver fur, a pommel horse upholstered in metallic silver leather and dumbbells with decorative hexagonal ends.

The dyed leather, fur and pony skin was hand-stitched to the forms by a team of craftspeople.

"Though on the surface these objects maintain the clearest characteristics of their distant cousins – those of regular pieces of gym equipment – they elude this first impression and become objects conceived for the upmost leisure," said exhibition curator Maria Cristina Didero.

"The objects are dissected and studied to discover a world obsessed by the mania of exercise but also of the obsession with perfect manufacture," she added. "The contrast between the discipline and effort, which gym gear usually at first glance suggests, is here overruled by the pure aesthetic enjoyment of the objects themselves."

Items from the collection are presented within areas marked out with tape, which is often used on the floors of ball-game courts for delineating areas of play.

This reference is also applied to a set of leather carpets patterned with sky blue broken lines and solid white lines, which Biagetta and Baldassari modelled on yoga mats.

A row of light tubes designed to look like gymnast's rings hang on lengths of cable from a brushed steel bar to create a light feature over one mat. Loops of electric blue pony skin connect the rings to the steel cabling.

Within another box, a hexagonal piece of translucent pink crystal balances on an arrangement of the free-weights to create a low table.

Two bright yellow fabric straps are wrapped around the circumference of a squat cylindrical pouffe covered in the blue pony skin.

The duo also produced a pair of Adidas trainers emblazoned with two well-defined biceps, while a low bench resembling a pommel horse is upholstered with metallic silver leather.

A wide strip of peach-coloured leather is applied to the centre of the piece like the cover for the arm of a sofa. Stubby brushed steel legs bound by a band of the same pale leather support the cylindrical seat

The Body Building collection will be on show at Atelier Biagetti in Milan's Tortona design district until 19 April.

Photography is by Delfino Sisto Legnani, unless otherwise stated.