Ghirò Studio On Sale

The founders of Ghirò Studio, Michele and Domenico Francesco Ghirò, draw their creative inspiration from flora and fauna, resulting in pieces as imaginative as they are refined. This father and son team is always looking for new forms and materials to use in their meticulously produced pieces. Each object begins as blocks of crystal and glass in intense colors, especially the shades of blue found in Mediterranean waters, which are carefully sculpted into ripples, waves, globules and other biomorphic forms.

Michele Ghirò was born in 1957 in Bari, Italy. He developed an early fascination with glass as an artistic medium. In his 20s, he moved to Milan, where he had a succession of jobs working with the glass, honing his artistic abilities and experimenting with its properties.

In 1996, he was hired by the renowned glass designer Giorgio Berlini and became owner of the company when Berlini retired. Often called the “King of Glass,” Ghirò decided to create an academy dedicated to his favorite medium in 2004, preserving ancient glass-making techniques through the teaching of apprentices. 

Domenico Francesco Ghirò was born in Milan in 1992 and showed the same artistic talent and fascination with glass as his father. As a teen, he worked in his father’s glass workshop, later attending a commercial art school, where he also learned computer graphics and design. His early pieces reflect his fascination with the art of Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. Later, he discovered the works of Max Ingrand, Gio Ponti and the lighting company Fontana Arte, which resulted in redirecting his creative focus toward modernist designs. 

In 2014, Michele and Domenico decided to launch a joint business venture,  moved to a more prominent location and named their workshop Ghiró Studio. Their first collaborative project was a collection of wall mirrors, which garnered immediate praise. Ghirò Studio’s works are prominently displayed in contemporary art galleries and stylish homes across North America, Europe and the Middle East.

On 1stDibs, find Ghirò Studio decorative objects, tables, lighting and more.

The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw sweeping social change and major scientific advances — both of which contributed to a new aesthetic: modernism. Rejecting the rigidity of Victorian artistic conventions, modernists sought a new means of expression. References to the natural world and ornate classical embellishments gave way to the sleek simplicity of the Machine Age. Architect Philip Johnson characterized the hallmarks of modernism as “machine-like simplicity, smoothness or surface [and] avoidance of ornament.”

Early practitioners of modernist design include the De Stijl (“The Style”) group, founded in the Netherlands in 1917, and the Bauhaus School, founded two years later in Germany.

Followers of both groups produced sleek, spare designs — many of which became icons of daily life in the 20th century. The modernists rejected both natural and historical references and relied primarily on industrial materials such as metal, glass, plywood, and, later, plastics. While Bauhaus principals Marcel Breuer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe created furniture from mass-produced, chrome-plated steel, American visionaries like Charles and Ray Eames worked in materials as novel as molded plywood and fiberglass. Today, Breuer’s Wassily chair, Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona chair — crafted with his romantic partner, designer Lilly Reich — and the Eames lounge chair are emblems of progressive design and vintage originals are prized cornerstones of collections.

It’s difficult to overstate the influence that modernism continues to wield over designers and architects — and equally difficult to overstate how revolutionary it was when it first appeared a century ago. But because modernist furniture designs are so simple, they can blend in seamlessly with just about any type of décor. Don’t overlook them.