One of the first pieces of furniture that Guatemalan design studio Piegatto created when it launched in 2006 is Pipo, a striking monolithic chair flaunting plywood curves that appear as if they are in motion. “The chair becomes a person in a certain way because it’s communicating through the armrests. It is a gesture that is welcoming,” says Piegatto cofounder and design director Alejandro Estrada.
As a child, Estrada often played alone on his father’s farm, nurturing his imagination far from city life. That pastoral immersion, coupled with an affinity for drawing, was the starting point of his creative career.
He was an architecture student at Francisco Marroquín University when he met and fell in love with Sandra Ovalle. The couple then moved to Italy, studying sculpture and art restoration, respectively, in Florence before returning to Guatemala and launching their firm, Substancia, in 2000. This architecture studio, restoration workshop, and art gallery was tasked with plentiful residential, commercial, and retail spaces, but in 2006, Estrada and Ovalle wanted to shift direction.
Substancia began to morph into Piegatto (the name, meaning to bend or fold, is a nod to the pair’s time in Italy), focusing on designing furniture “that can withstand time,” as Estrada puts it. With Ovalle overseeing the fiber and textile department and their son Pietro, an architect who joined the business in 2016 as a junior designer, Piegatto is a true family enterprise.
The process of conceiving Piegatto’s chairs, stools, tables, benches, bookshelves, and lamps begins with a period that Estrada describes as a desert, where “nothing comes up. But it is important you get that time, remembering that you cannot force anything.” Soon, however, inspiration hits and Estrada starts drawing his designs, which turn into prototypes to visualize the ergonomics and structural parts of the product. After that, production begins.
Layered wood is at the heart of the company’s designs, suggesting both dynamism and lightness. The pieces are often distinguished by ripples that mimic nature and play with light and shadow, like the pipe-shaped Martin bench and the stacked Pebbles table, both fashioned out of laminated birch and spruce.
Although the furniture exudes a heftiness, Estrada wants it to feel transparent, so that it expresses “movement, or when you see it in different views, it will change completely,” he points out. “It’s like a sculpture, but this sculpture also has a use.”
Estrada is currently pursuing B Corp certification to cement the brand’s holistically sustainable reputation—from when “the piece was born until it is delivered,” he adds.
An outdoor furniture collection is also in the works, reinterpreting some of Piegatto’s legendary wood designs with hardy fiberglass so that “the appearance might look similar, but all the edges and the surfaces will be completely soft,” says Estrada. No matter how the company grows, he promises, the furniture will always “bring joy to people’s homes.”
This article originally appeared in HD’s August 2023 issue.
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