Mandelli / Pagliarulo

We are Simone Mandelli and Antonio Pagliarulo. This is our design studio. We work in furniture and textile design, with happy cameos in communication design and art direction.

We are different, in some ways opposites, yet design has united us for many years. One brings naivety, the other shrewdness, one madness, the other order, one idealism, the other pragmatism, one a look to the past, the other to the future, one the hurdy-gurdy, the other Rock n' Roll. Feelings that experienced by one person alone would indicate serious dissociations, but which, combined in creative dialectics, in a random and unpredictable order, become the condition for our well-being: we enjoy designing, and in particular designing things that can be touched, used, looked at, things that leave even the slightest suspicion that one or more human intelligences have worked with devotion to bring them into existence.

From a stylistic perspective, these premises create serious problems for anyone who tries to define us. We sometimes describe ourselves as mannerists, sometimes as innovative inventors, often as snobbish lovers of quotes, sometimes as explorers. The bottom line is that we are artisans, working with the ideas of shapes as if they were a concrete material. We repeat the same loving gestures for decades, combining fragments, uniting forms collected over time, until, every now and then, we reach complete satisfaction: if you try sometimes you get what you need