The Spanish designer's career has progressed in Italy, where she has worked as an assistant to Castiglioni and Eugenio Bottinelli in Milan and Paris (1990–1992), and then at the product development division of De Padova with Vico Magistretti, an experience she considers seminal because it exposed her to the approach of the Milanese master, which values each and every stage of the creative process, from initial idea to finished product.

She worked alongside Magistretti at Lissoni Associati from 1996 to 2001, when she went solo. It currently operates in a variety of fields, with product design as its central focus, though interior design and architecture are also becoming increasingly important components of the company's portfolio.

Urquiola's work as a product designer focuses primarily on domestic settings; it is there that she experiments with the principles of design by analogy and pays attention to traditional techniques, knowledges, and materials within the framework of innovative reinterpretation.