Space – Vision – Transformation: so says the cover of the book that collects a significant selection from among the references that Archventil has put in its portfolio, the so-called The Archiventil effect, that tell how to build the marriage between the client and his space, especially after conversing with Elena Tomlenova who, without ever ceasing to smile, tells and tells about herself
Everything revolves around a BID….
BID stands for Basic Interior Design, basic because it’s essential and not because it’s poor, then BID in English means “offer” and it just seemed to fit perfectly with our thinking. I have always been bothered by chaos in the design process, I want everything to be organized and linear, I have my own vision and try to ground it with a structured and controllable path. BID was the “first baby,” the rock on which I built the firm and its way of operating from the client’s brief: that way there is control over everything from the initial budget to changes in progress, from architectural to formal furniture choices.
I have distributed all the components of a project by assigning each one a color that relates to an asset of the project. The assets for me are three: economics, logic and engineering, and aesthetics and art. This way I have an easily readable overview and have the ability to quickly decide on priorities and timelines. The BID tells me in real time whether I am in line with the client’s brief and wishes.
Are clients always clear on budget?
Of course not, but with this approach I also solve the uncertainties of those who don’t have a budget well in mind, sometimes they don’t even know how many items it may consist of.
I try to start with straightforward and simple things, questions like “In your opinion, how much does a good sofa cost?” and the answer already points me down a path that begins to outline a way to build the project. Then I’m also interested in knowing other more personal things like “Do you like to cook? Do you love music? Do you have hobbies and which ones?” The answers clearly enrich the client’s profile and help us make good choices.
And here we get into the economic sphere I guess?
That’s right, I tell the client that he is free to choose what he wants, if he tells me how much he wants to spend, at this point, I decline the value in the scheme of his BID and decide the priorities. If the client is not clear I start in reverse and propose a solution that in practice could cost up to 10 times more than what the client assumes to spend, but no problem, we take room by room and starting with the priorities we start subtracting until the client says okay. Virtually everyone chooses the second way.
How do clients come to you?
Not only by word of mouth, in fact not much I would say, we have 9 employees so we need a lot of projects. The firm has a very well-prepared marketing area on digital with always high SEO positioning and through very refined keywords that are able to intercept clients who are ready to invest, but maybe not well oriented on how and the eventual choice of a partner for the project. There is still the thought that a designer can only be afforded by the big spenders, and this is clearly not the case. On social, on the other hand, the referral narrative works, and here, too, our specialists always have their motor running.
Between residential and hospitality is there a connection for your system?
Yes certainly, although in the last few years we have focused on residential: I don’t move into other design worlds-even if they attract me and stimulate my imagination-until I have dug deep into a sector and digested it. But in the meantime, we have done a lot of Bed&Breakfast projects (of course applying BID as well) that are somewhere between classic residential and the larger, more structured hotellerie. Now we are looking at the office world with interest, and here more than BID works Mood that offers advice on finishes and furnishings, also because usually office spaces are already defined and requests are about more aesthetic aspects.
What did you bring with you from your experience with De Lucchi?
I’ve always been very lucky with the Masters I’ve crossed paths with, of De Lucchi I remember the energy and a healthy craziness. When he talked about the design process he said that a project also changes the designer, sometimes a little sometimes a lot, the intersection of people and their needs with the designer and his creativity produces a unicum of which everyone – client and architect – takes something home. When I was in college and attending his lectures I was not taking notes like everyone else but drawing in my notebook, and at one point he got up and came to me and said, “I’m terribly curious to see what drawings you do while I’m talking, let’s exchange notebooks.” I was very excited, I couldn’t understand how that situation happened to me. The gesture-beyond all else-has remained etched in my memory. At the end of the course, our group had gotten 29, and I proposed to turn it down: not because it was a bad grade, but because I would have liked to – and I did – go as much as possible to his studio to work on that project with him.
How did you choose the partner companies?
It is not by chance that we work with certain of the companies, but chance sometimes helps. We do a lot of analysis of the players we involve, but sometimes we also let go and make more emotional, skin-deep choices, a kind of “yes because yes,” and the concrete reasons come later and on their own. Then a part of my professional past helped me: when I was 18 years old I was working in Moscow in a furniture import-export company and I was a designer, I was passing dozens of Italian companies of all levels and styles, price lists, prices every day, I was seeing how they worked, how they behaved. All this trained me to make selection.
There are more than 300 projects that Archventil has “brought home” in its 12 years of existence: beyond the obvious – let’s say – technical skills and the joyful, unstoppable organizing machine, it is the ways of approach that leave a mark. There is a passage in the intro that Elena Tomlenova wrote in her book that says architecture is also about “transforming habits and shaping new possibilities”: designing is just like bringing the client together with their new space where every room is a scene from a wedding.
