An approach to recover object oriented design patterns from design and code is presented. The pattern recovery process is based on a multi-stage filtering strategy to avoid combinatorial explosion on large software systems. To maintain independence from the language and the case tools adopted in developing software, both design and code are mapped into an intermediate representation. The multi-stage searching strategy allows to safely determine pattern candidates. To assess the effectiveness of the pattern recovery process a portable environment written in Java has been developed. Based on this environment, experimental results on public domain and industrial software were obtained and are discussed in the paper. Evidence is shown that, by exploiting information about method calls as a further constraint beyond the structural ones, the number of false positives is reduced.