Contemporary Italian designer Antonio Citterio, the founder of Antonio Citterio Patricia Viel, works on some of the most luxurious projects across the globe with a team of eight partners and more than 90 employees in offices in Milan and New York. His architectural and interior design firm is hired by Rome-based jeweler-turned-hotelier Bulgari and others.

Citterio also works with a small, independent team to create designs for the best furniture and product manufacturers, including B&B Italia, Flexform, Maxalto, Technogym, Arclinea and Hansgrohe, just to scratch the surface. I fell in love with Antonio Citterio’s design as an architecture student at the University of Oregon, poring over the hard-to-get Interni and Abitare magazines in the Architecture Library. His work was unlike anything I had seen. He invented what we think of today as the contemporary Italian design.