He completed his training in England by collaborating with industrial design studios. In 1972 he founded the Citterio-Nava studio with Antonio Citterio.

Together they designed some of the iconic products of Italian design. Since 1982 he has continued his activity as a designer independently, focusing on the design of furniture products for many prestigious Italian and international brands. His projects highlight the continuous search for a possible dialogue between his own poetic vision and the concrete industrial and production needs. Through a personal conceptual approach to the living space, he generates a profound transformation of use, building new relationships between materials and technologies, where the shape of his objects is often only the natural consequence of a precise design path.

Paolo Nava is the creator of some of the design concepts that have most revolutionized domestic design from the 1970s to today, creating timeless formal and functional archetypes. A fundamental aspect of his work is the direct experimentation on materials and the three dimensional verification through the laboratory model. Over 40 years of professional activity, the Paolo Nava studio has received numerous prestigious international awards for design.