Giorgio Topan, one signature from boardroom to bench

Some designers spend a career at one end of the office; Giorgio Topan has signed both. Born in Padova in 1958, an IUAV Venice graduate of 1982 who trained at the Zanussi/Electrolux design centre, he spent more than twenty years in a shared practice with Gianantonio Perin before taking the lead, in 2015, of Topan & Partners — a studio working across office, home, lighting and graphics. That long run inside Italian factories taught him the whole floor plan, not just the corner of it.

At one extreme sits Lloyd, the executive collection he signed for IVM Office; at the other, E-Place, an operative line drawn for DVO. The chairman's desk and everyone else's desk, held by the same hand — and since La Mercanti carries both ends of that spectrum, specifying a coherent office becomes unusually simple. Rank changes; the signature does not.