Please  give us a brief background of who you are and how/when you started your company,  i.e when your interest in Design started?

I got the high school degree in chemistry that I consider significant although it seems it doesn’t have a lot to do with design. Actually, it has allowed me to have a technical approach to the project, giving me the opportunity to design revolutionary mechanisms and to realize surfaces with amazing tactile sensations such as the tactile glass: its surface is incredibly pleasing to the touch and makes the glass perceived as warm material.  However, what I consider particularly meaningful for my personal development it is my curiosity, that lead me to read more than thousand books.

Where do you draw inspiration from for your interior styles and why?

What I really consider as main reference points are Mother Nature and my constant search for freedom. Looking at them, for example, I realized the new Graphic Vitrum (new of printed glasses technique) which is inspired to the texture of butterfly wings that I simply enlarged. Or, the New Logica System that has radically changed ergonomics in the kitchen: this system recreates the effect of directing the gaze to a cloud of light instead of the furniture that block the view.

What are in your opinion the upcoming trends in the design industry?

An industrial product must increasingly satisfy its functional needs besides the aesthetic ones. For this reason, in Valcucine we studied and transformed the kitchen’s ergonomics adding exclusive systems to give the possibility to have everything at hand and bring everything back in order with a simple gesture of the hand.

What is your most memorable achievements and why?

Respect for the environment is among the guidelines of my personal thinking. The product I am most satisfied about is the one that best represent this concept: Invitrum kitchen, made of 100% glass and aluminum, which perfectly respects the idea of circular economy generating no waste at the end of its life.

What are the most challenging aspect of your work?

The real challenge is the project that allows some sort of thought processing. We’re living in a society in which standard thought becomes a univocal element and where the possibility to elaborate different thoughts is a unique opportunity. Thanks to the thought processing you can invent new things, you can change them. The lack of thought causes passivity which in turn causes standardization.

What is your furniture of choice and why?

I prefer empty and bare houses where the furniture takes part in creating the atmosphere of harmony of diversity.

What excites you the most about South African design?

The outburst of colors that conveys a sense of cheerfulness and happiness, something that we Westerners have lost by persisting on depressive colors.

What are your future plans?

I will continue to be a designer, write books and … do physics experiments.

Describe yourself in three words?

Crazy, observer, nature lover.

The book that changed your life?

“Nuclear Dilemma” by Carlo Rubbia *, because it made me aware of environmental problems already 30 years ago.

*Carlo Rubbia is an Italian particle physicist and inventor who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1984 with Simon van der Meer for work leading to the discovery of the W and Z particles at CERN.