Spaces for VitrA

How a design idea evolved into a scalable spatial language across products, places and brand experiences.

Concept Designer / Design Director

My relationship with VitrA began in 2012–2013 through the design of an innovation exhibition space. The central question was simple but demanding: how can a space behave like a blank sheet of paper and make innovation visible?

Rather than creating a fixed architectural statement, the aim was to establish a framework that could remain relevant over time and accommodate continuous change. The space needed to support new products, technologies and narratives without being redesigned from the beginning each time.

Architecture was not intended to compete with what was exhibited. Its role was to create clarity, hierarchy and flexibility so that innovation itself could become the protagonist. That project became my introduction to VitrA and, in retrospect, the starting point of a much broader relationship between products, environments and brand identity.

After becoming Design Director in 2014, my responsibility expanded beyond products to include the environments in which the brand was experienced. My role was to conceive the main spatial ideas, develop the design concepts and provide overall creative and design direction as architects, designers, technical teams and implementation partners brought them into built form.

Over the following years, we developed international fair stands, showrooms, factory entrance and visitor areas, retail displays, product presentation systems, overseas showrooms and information centres.

Each had a different purpose. A fair stand had to communicate quickly and clearly. A showroom required a more immersive and long-term experience. Factory environments needed to connect industrial capability with brand values, while retail spaces had to make complex product ranges easier to understand.

Across these different applications, a shared spatial language gradually emerged, flexible enough to adapt to different markets, scales and functions.

Being responsible for both product design and the broader design direction of VitrA's environments created an opportunity to connect the two more closely.

Products were no longer simply placed inside neutral spaces. Their proportions, materials, systems and modes of use began to influence how environments were organised and experienced. At the same time, spatial work influenced how we thought about products, product families and displays.

Questions of scale, sequence, material continuity, colour, rhythm and user movement moved naturally between the two disciplines. The boundary gradually became less distinct. Spaces helped explain the products, while products increasingly helped define the spaces.

The result was greater coherence across very different brand experiences without reducing them to a fixed architectural formula.

Years later, when the innovation exhibition hall was redesigned, the project became an opportunity to bring together what we had learned through nearly a decade of spatial work. The new space incorporated experience gained from fairs, showrooms, factories, retail environments and product presentation systems.

In this sense, the project came full circle.

What began with a question about how architecture could make innovation visible had evolved into a design logic for expressing VitrA across different physical contexts.

Its value was not one successful space, but the ability to create continuity without uniformity. New projects could build on a shared understanding rather than reinventing the brand each time. For me, Spaces for VitrA became an ongoing design practice rather than a single architectural project: a dialogue in which products shape spaces, spaces shape products, and both contribute to the identity and experience of the brand.