Based in London, Reality is__ is a design studio led by Italian architect Carola Migliore and British designer Miles Wagner. With a predominantly artistic approach, the studio creates installations for brands, exhibitions, and experimental projects, focusing on the audience and their psychology. This vision is well summarized by a quote from Gio Ponti, which the studio has embraced: “For every window, the architect must imagine a person looking out. For every door, a person crossing through it.” The studio focuses on the pure and simple ideas inherent in art, creating memorable experiences that resonate with those who live them. The intersection of diverse disciplines, combined with a strong emotional component, is the studio’s hallmark.
How would you describe Reality is__ to someone discovering your work for the first time?
Carola: We’re a design studio with an artistically driven approach. We create brand experiences and exhibitions as well as experimental installations. We’re interested in the audience and their psychology so we focus on how people move through a space, what they feel, how they connect with the story we’re telling, and what stays with them afterwards. There’s a quote from Gio Ponti that sums it up: “For every window, the architect must imagine someone looking out. For every door, someone passing through.”
How does being artistically led shape the way you work?
Miles: We love the purity of an idea that art can bring, something singular and emotional. With design, we’re solving challenges, but our aim is to create experiences that deliver on a clear idea so they stick with people. We have this approach even when responding to a specific brief from brand and cultural sector clients – we try to define the most interesting and immediate narrative, and work from there. We make space for self-initiated artwork too, which is more open-ended. A lot of these ideas start with a “Wouldn’t it be cool if…” and grow from there. Some of them carry a clear message or question, and others are more instinctive, just a feeling we want to explore. Echo Archive was one of those. We got obsessed with visualising music in a tactile way, so we began experimenting and a piece evolved out of it. We pitched it to a few people, and it eventually found a home at a lighting festival in the US last October.
Who have been some of your mentors, and how have they influenced your way of thinking and working at Reality is__?
Carola: I think it’s a mix of people who’ve each shaped something along the way. I was lucky enough to know Italo Lupi personally for many years – one of the greats in graphic design – from whom I learned about the intersection of graphics, architecture, and audience perception. Miles and I both worked for Alex McCuaig at MET Studio, and we still meet regularly to pick his brain about design and business. We’re always learning from him. He gave me opportunities like moving to Dubai and working on the Mobility Pavilion at Expo, alongside teams such as Foster + Partners and Weta Workshop – an invaluable experience! There are also people we don’t know personally but who have been hugely influential for us. Such as Es Devlin, for her continuous innovation in show design; Paul Cocksedge, who’s great at executing a clear idea and letting the process become part of the final outcome; and CJ Hendry, for the scale and playfulness she brings to her art exhibitions.
Miles: Plus, we get a lot from bouncing ideas around with friends working in all sorts of creative fields and beyond. Some have started their own studios or businesses, and it’s exciting to be around people with ambition – there’s a sense that we’re all pushing each other!
How do your different backgrounds shape the way you work together?
Carola: Culturally, we just approach things differently. There’s definitely an Italian way of doing things, and a British way – and we’ve learned when to lean into each! It’s not always the same person leading – we switch depending on what’s needed, and that flexibility has become a big part of how we work.
Miles: The fact that Carola’s an architect and I come from product design and branding means that with Reality is__ we cover a lot of ground. We care about strong ideas, but we also know how to make them real. It means we can take something from the first sketch all the way through to the final build, without losing what made the idea exciting in the first place.
What pushed you to start the studio?
Miles: We’ve always played around with ideas and side projects, but during Covid, we started properly developing a project called ALIVE – a music-based installation exploring new ways for people to experience sound and space, especially when live events weren’t possible. We developed a concept around the new social parameters, but also began thinking about how to realise it, so ended up creating a fully formed pitch deck.
Carola: The project never actually happened! But it made us realise how much we wanted the freedom to explore those kinds of ideas properly – not just on the side, but as the main focus. And after pitching ALIVE to numerous people, the right opportunity came along, and we did our first project during Milan Design Week for the car brand CUPRA. That led to the beginning of Reality is__!
Where does the name ‘Reality is__’ come from?
Carola: It comes from something I used to say a lot when I arrived in the UK – “the reality is…blah blah” and at some point we joked it could be a name for a studio as we liked how open it felt. It suggests collaboration and feels like something that is incomplete in an enticing way. We added the underscores there to further imply there’s more to come, like a blinking text cursor half way through a sentence.
Is collaboration a big part of your way of working?
Carola: Definitely! We’re a small studio, so collaboration is a big part of how we work. We often bring in other creatives – sound designers, animators, creative technologists – to help us bring our ideas to life. Sometimes we also team up with other studios, whether they’re smaller or bigger than us, depending on the scale of the project.
Miles: It’s always about building on a clear concept that we’ve developed, and then working with the right people to shape it into something real. Everyone we work with brings a different perspective, and often takes the work in unexpected directions which is something we really value. It keeps the process open and stops it from feeling too familiar or repetitive.
What’s next for Reality is__ and any projects opening soon?
Miles: We’re working on a few things at the moment plus we’re looking to explore other areas of art as well as design – especially scenography for music, theatre, and film, where naturally, performance and the audience are central. We’re in the middle of our biggest project so far – an exhibition for a major London museum. It’s an exciting one for us, not just in scale but in subject matter as it brings together some of the themes we’re most drawn to. We can’t say much more just yet, but it’s due to open in early 2026, and we’re really looking forward to seeing how people respond to it.
