Studio

Francesco Meneghello has a distinctive personality, continually evolving and rooted in a search for narrative and material repertoires as yet unexplored, where silence and wonder live side by side. His creative thinking is driven by a fervent curiosity that lends substance and meaning to each impression, never denying itself the pleasure of digression or divertissement. Shaped by his training and by a natural leaning towards the artistic avant-gardes, East Asian philosophy, experimental music, auteur cinema and conceptual fashion, his is a poetics at odds with convention. Over time it takes on shifting, iridescent tones, while the ethical vision at its source holds firm. The Studio’s projects spring from an uncompromising fidelity to the personal codes that underpin his practice, and speak of bold ingenuity and unyielding elegance. Out of this come spaces and objects, rarefied Wunderkammern, in which the layering of different registers resolves into an aesthetic that is always recognisable.

Francesco Meneghello’s contemplative approach finds expression in a rational pragmatism guided by a principle of subtraction. Each intuition stems from a deliberate act of renunciation and is governed by the will to reveal its essence through projects that hold architecture, the visual arts, sculpture and technology in distilled form. Over the years, the Studio has built a select network of independent artisans, local ateliers and long-established workshops, keepers of a rare and irreplaceable savoir-faire. Their craft turns thought into objects true to the original intent and executed to an impeccable standard. Francesco Meneghello personally leads every project, cultivating direct and open relationships with his team, clients and craftspeople. His analogue way of working is consciously unhurried. It fosters an exchange between equals and allows time for discussion, abstraction and drawing by hand.

The Studio remains, by choice, a boutique practice, with projects in Italy and abroad that weave together the many scales of interior design. For private clients and companies, its scope extends from the spaces people live and work in to partly handcrafted objects, and on to collectible design editions. Francesco Meneghello favours commissions that call for an authorial voice, and clients who share a keen appreciation of personal artistic enquiry free from any pressure to conform. Only on these terms can he express his vision in full and keep it intact through to completion. Novelty and daring lie at the heart of his work. He welcomes unusual commissions with natural ease, never diluting his identity. Every request is considered with meticulous care to draw out its potential and develop it into an emblematic project.

Turning away from fast design and mass-market production, Francesco Meneghello’s vision looks to the great flowering of the applied arts, when free and independent thought took precedence over the dictates of marketing and transcended them, materialising in works made to endure. Every choice is weighed and reflects an awareness and a sensibility grounded in integrity. Frivolity, deference to commercial trends and form without content are irreconcilable with the principles and aims of the Studio, which keeps its distance from the noise of information and stimuli that saturate our age. Time is fundamental to Francesco Meneghello’s practice, which resists the cult of immediacy. The deliberately small number of projects he commits to makes room for a freedom of invention and composition that always tends towards the essential and remains untouched by conformity.

In 2024, a decade after founding the Studio, Francesco Meneghello conceived a label devoted to imagining and forging limited editions of collectible design. A radical, polyphonic and mutable platform, it encourages experimentation through objects, opening new avenues of meaning that draw on art, play, dream and metaphor. Every edition takes its bearings from the manifesto Absence is more, ranging freely across materials and formal vocabularies, and straining the rigid rationalist bond between form and function. The sixteen axioms invite reflection, forever in flux, on the quality of artefacts, their meaning and their longevity, and act as a cultural counterweight to a world thick with the ersatz. Francesco Meneghello sets the creative direction and curates the platform’s image. He develops the editions on his own or with collaborators brought together by elective affinities, often from unexpected fields. The label has no logo, and its name encapsulates its iconoclastic calling. WE DON’T DESIGN.