The inception of Artefilo. Returning to my cherished roots.

After three decades of designing for screens, I’m transitioning back to traditional product design. The personal, full-circle journey that brought me to this unforeseen decision.

Ancient history.

I am an only child born to two Italian architects at the end of the sixties. Dust, design books, and concept sketches were my primary companions around my parents’ studio, where I took my first steps and dreamed of emulating them as they were making things. I was surrounded by drawings of chairs, sofas, cups, ashtrays, egg holders, and much more. In those days, they still made all their moulds by hand. Any help from a computer was yet to be a passing thought.

My parents’ ability to make beautiful things from scratch fascinated me. A few messy drawings would slowly become fledgling prototypes, and then a long series of negotiations with manufacturers would begin. This profession was less financially rewarding than one might imagine, but it was colorful and genuinely inspirational for my creative growth.

Finding my way away from home.

As a young adult, I decided to follow in my parents’ footsteps and study architecture. But instead of studying close to home in Sicily, as they wished, I left the nest and enrolled in a university in the Italian capital.

Living in Rome was a huge financial gamble, especially in the first few years. I was a student by day, a bistro server by night, and a political activist on the weekends. While I navigated some questionable housing situations and turbulent relationships, I also realized that being an architect would not be as satisfying as I thought. (Too much cement and mathematics.)

But luck and creative thinking soon intervened to help. Scanning local job postings in the newspaper, I noticed a graphic design internship in a small design firm called Boogie Movies. Money was running out, and calling my parents for help was beyond the pale for my fiercely independent younger self, so I showed up to an interview in the most eccentric early 80s outfit anyone could muster. And somehow, I was hired.

Both partners were extraordinarily kind to their new intern, who knew a little about Adobe applications. And their help and encouragement, without a doubt, truly changed my life's course.

The rest is history. I was incredibly fortunate to “grow up” as a designer at the same time as the new era of digital design transformed the world. The internet and browsers took hold of people's attention and telephonic modems became the sound of the future. My design career took me from Rome to Paris to Rome again, followed by New York, Boston, Seattle, and back to treasured Europe more than twenty years later, where I landed in beautiful Amsterdam.

From screens to materials.

Digital design has been the center of my professional life for more than three decades. But something started nagging at me after I joined Icon Incar in 2021 to design the screen interfaces inside cars. While it was essential to connect the relationships between those automotive experiences and the physical car interiors, the off-screen environment often fell outside our team’s scope. I realized, quite late in my career, that something was suppressed from my inspirations.

At the same time, 3D printing was rapidly becoming more accessible to individual creators, and curiosity quickly pulled me into this world. I decided to invest in a few printers and test my limited skills in 3D development applications.

The first months were a struggle. Expanding my thinking to include a new dimension was not easy. Pixels are not always flat, but they are always placed on imaginary grids. On top of that, my printers were loud — the loudest companions anyone could keep in an attic while a family was trying to live below.

Then my daughter was born last year. For this sailor, her arrival was the “shot across the bow” that changed how I started contemplating my future. Right there, between diapers, laughs, and screams, the revelation of me missing my deepest dimensional impulses rose to the surface, and the idea of Artefilo began to take shape. Was I capable? Was it possible? Was this another one of those radical risks I am so attracted to? Would the products I design be attractive or even useful? I was unsure about everything, but this new feeling of creative freedom and emotional clarity was too strong for me not to consider.

So I rented a space on the “kaasmarkt” of one of the most charming towns in Holland. I began to test my designs, focusing on circular materials that can be assembled locally with low-waste printing techniques. Today, I can say without a doubt that this is what I probably always wanted to do but never dared to do.

A new dimensional future.

Building Artefilo represents the next step in a journey that started a lifetime ago in my parents' studio. It turns out that thermoplastic moulds, back-of-napkin sketches, and all those family trips to visit manufacturers were essential experiences in my path to becoming a designer of both digital and physical products. It is therapeutic to engage my core memories so many decades later in this new creative endeavour.

If you have read this far, thank you. I hope you have enjoyed Artefilo’s origin story and will consider supporting my small, sustainable business the next time you shop for home decor. I am looking forward to doing my absolute best to delight many of you with my creations in the future.