Daniele Del Missier, the designer who chose the least glamorous job in design

Chairs get the magazine covers. Partitions get the floor plans. Daniele Del Missier — born in Buenos Aires in 1952, an architecture graduate of Venice's IUAV — built his whole career on the side nobody photographs: seventeen years with Bandiera e Facchini in Treviso, then Ubis, then eleven years running R&D at Faram, and since 2013 the Centro Progetti Tecno.

The unfashionable choice paid off. His W80 partition for Tecno took both the Red Dot Design Award and the ADI Design Index in 2015; the W40 wall and the Clavis table system followed the same quiet logic. La Mercanti carries the W80 in its catalogue — proof that the spotlight, in the end, is wired into the wall he drew.