Decoratori Bassanesi is renowned for its incredible tiles which bring a distinctly contemporary aesthetic to decorative surfaces. Through collaborations with globally renowned architects and designers, the 37-year-old Italian design house has expanded traditional tile design dialogues to encompass modern Italian artistry and progressive approaches to materiality.

Enter Federica Biasi, Milanese product and industrial designer, founder of Federica Biasi Studio, and art director for Decoratori Bassanesi. Federica’s distinctive design style is one of formal simplicity with a clean aesthetic approach. Federica embarked on the design of a collection of tiles, introducing herself to Decoratori Bassanesi with a set of studio-made prototypes. The team fell in love with Federica’s ideas, deciding within 15 minutes of meeting her that they would produce her Wabi Sabi range. Within 6 months it was completed and out in the world.

It was the beginning of a deeper relationship, and Decoratori Bassanesi invited Federica to work with them more strategically as their art director. “I fell in love with the world of tiles… It’s a very technical world, very industrial too, and at the same time it can be artisanal,” she says.

Federica describes the process of designing tiles as a world made of textures, materials and colours, which is, above all, technical and industrial. With Decoratori Bassanesi, every product designed – often through collaboration – reveals “something new that wasn’t known before”.

Decoratori Bassanesi’s founder Paolo Serraiotto credits Federica with helping to drive new design collaborations between the company and globally recognised designers. As Federica says, “collaboration opens Decoratori Bassanesi’s eyes to the future”, uniting different viewpoints and mindsets to conceive “unique and unrepeatable products”.

There is distinct and distinguishing power in this, combatting what Federica observes as a plethora of indistinguishable products that are increasingly in oversupply. Quality and detail, she says, are important in making products stand out, revealing differentiating factors of expertise and craftsmanship between designers and manufacturers.

Besides Federica’s stand-out Wabi-Sabi collection, Decoratori Bassanesi has also worked with the likes of Nendo to conceive the Windy collection, and Norm Architects for the Copenhagen Collection. “Nendo told us he wanted to design the wind … after discussing with him we looked to create the effect that wind has on nature,” explains Paolo.

The best-selling Copenhagen range designed by Norm Architects, in contrast, is based on the architects’ love of limestone, which is used extensively throughout the built environment in their home town of Copenhagen.

Again, producing tiles is a highly technical operation and as Paolo points out, Decoratori Bassanesi goes to great lengths to ensure the original idea of the designer is understood exactly, and the artistry and original design intent is respected through the process of manufacture too. Because, “a product that’s well designed is a product you can fall in love with”, says Paolo.