His intense activity, both as an architect and as a designer, which began soon after the Second World War, is outstanding for its originality, preventing any scholastic classification. 
His furniture were displayed in events and exhibitions in Milan right after the end of the War, such as the one in Fedi Cheti’s furniture textiles shop, and the R.I.M.A. at the Palazzo dell’Arte, where Magistretti presented a textile folder chair and a bookshelf.  
In 1949 he designed little overlapping tables for Azucena and in 1951 the round extensible table Sending for Tecno.
For almost a decade, in the Fifties, he has been active mainly in the field of architecture. In Milan he designed the QT8 Church, the Park Tower in Via Rovere and in Piazzale Aquileia, the house in via San Marco, houses in Piazza San Babila, the Biology Department of the Università Statale and the Subway’s Station Deposit at Famagosta. Moreover, villas in Azzate, Ghiffa, Arenzano, Carimate, the City Hall in Cusano Milanino, a house in Tokyo, the Centro Cavagnari of the Cassa di Risparmio in Parma, the “Esselunga” supermarket in Pantigliate, Tecnocentro Cassa di Risparmio in Bologna.
He has come back to design at the beginning of the Sixties, when Cassina, after having seen his work at the Golf Club-House in Carimate, decided to manufacture on a large scale the chair designed by Magistretti for that project: the Carimate chair, still manufactured by De Padova.
That is how his long co-operation with Cassina started, and many successful home furniture were created hereafter, such as the Maralunga sofa (1973), the Nuvola Rossa bookshelf (1977), the Sindbad armchair (1981), the Veranda armchair and seating system (1983).
In the Sixties Magistretti designed plastic furniture, the little tables Demetrio, made of patterned reinforced resin, produced in 1966 by Artemide, following the features of the wooden overlapping tables designed for Azucena.
The concept of unique bending object reaches its climax with the Selene chair, designed for Artemide in 1969. Its peculiar feature consists of the particular solution found for its legs, obtained through an “s” section, which makes possible the reaching of a form resistant with a constant material thickness. This is the development of a process already adopted in 1966 for the legs of the plastic table Stadio, and in the same year it had been applied as a formal principle, also to the ground lamp Chimera, both designed for Artemide.   
The following developments on this theme have been designed in 1970: the plastic armchairs Gaudì and Vicario, where the legs design is the same, while the adding of armrests is possible due to the existence of empty parts of the chassis. 
Magistretti began to co-operate with Artemide designing lamps such as Lambda and Omega (1961), then Mania (1963), Erse and Demetrio (1964), Eclisse, Cirene e Dalù (1965), Chimera (1966), Teti (1967), Nemea (1979). His projects on lamps continued also with O' Luce, designing the Apollo (1977), Pascal (1979), Slalom (1985), Ester (1987), and Nara (1991) lamps.
In 1969 he designed the Ciambella lamp for Fontana Arte, continuing this co-operation in 2000 when he designed the Margaret lamp. 
In 1978 Magistretti designed the Nathalie bed for Flou, the first textile bed which had a great success.
In 1979 he created the furniture collection Broomstik for Alias, made of massive wood: the Tenorio hanger, the Bath bookshelf and the Regina d’Africa armchair.
In the second half of the Eighties Magistretti designed a series of furniture for De Padova creating a very peculiar collection of products to be used both in homes and in offices. The collection started with the Davis sofas and armchairs, and continued with the Vidun table (1986), the Marocca (1987) and the Silver (1989) chairs.
In 1994 he worked for Fritz Hansen, a Danish company, for which he designed the Vico, Vicosolo and Vicodue chairs, dealing with the problems connected to mass-production processes, as he also did when he designed the Mauna Kea chair for Kartell.
In his design projects, Vico Magistretti has often re-elaborated formal solutions pertaining to anonymous design and tradition, which are so utilized for mass-production manufacturing, as it happened for the Carimate chair or the Marocca armchair. However he has always paid much attention to the historical roots of design, as when designing the Silver chair, for which he was inspired by the wooden model 811 designed by Josef Hoffmann for Thonet in 1925, which he modernized by choosing new materials.