The hand behind the Café Royal refit: Piero Lissoni

London already knows the work, if not always the name. The refurbishment of the historic Café Royal and the public areas of a residential development in the capital both come from the Milan and New York practice led by Piero Lissoni, architect, designer and art director, whose studio has spent close to forty years moving between architecture, landscape, interiors, product and graphics rather than settling into one of them. The same office entered the competition for a museum of language in London with a concept it called Language Symphony — evidence of a practice that treats a chair and a building as the same problem at different scales, held together by proportion, coherence and a visual code you recognise on sight.

British specifiers meet that hand at desk height through La Mercanti: two Tecno pieces from 2006, still built today — the Asymmetrical desk and, for the boardroom, Asymmetrical Meeting.