From Alife
Before Meola made furniture, the family restored it. That early work still informs what leaves the studio today.
The Meola story begins with furniture that had already been lived with. In 1992, the family began sourcing and restoring antiques from a warehouse outside the historic centre of Alife, in southern Italy. Cabinets, desks and tables arrived carrying the decisions of earlier makers. Burl appeared among them often enough to become a particular interest.
Restoration asks for close attention. A surface has to be understood before it can be worked on. There are edges to examine and old repairs to recognise; the grain may change direction where a first glance suggests it continues. It is an education in how furniture is put together, and in what survives use. For Meola, that knowledge came before the idea of an original collection.
Almost three decades later, the family business faced an uncertain future. Costs were rising and the market was changing. Vincenzo Meola and Joel Gibson began working together at this point, bringing a shared interest in interiors to the question of what the studio might become.
Some of the first photographs of that new chapter were made in a small East London flat.
Furniture was brought into the rooms and photographed among the things already there. The images later appeared in Vogue Living. A business that had depended on markets and personal introductions was beginning to reach people who had never been to Alife.
The change was gradual. The collection became more focused, and production, which had temporarily expanded to Egypt, returned to southern Italy. Artisans who had worked with the family on antiques remained involved as the studio moved towards its own designs. Their familiarity with the material connected the two kinds of work.
Today, each piece is made to order. A supporting structure is built, then olive burl is selected, cut and laid by hand. The placement matters. A change in the direction of the grain can alter the way a drawer front reads, or how a broad tabletop meets its edge. Sanding and successive stages of finishing follow.
The finished collection includes open bookcases, drawers and tables. The same material behaves differently across them. It appears in narrow sections around a shelf, in the offset layers of Hebi, and across the broad circular top of Ruota. These differences in scale allow us to work with the grain in several ways within one collection.
We still work from Alife. The furniture now travels further, but the workshop remains the place where a drawing meets a particular sheet of wood, and where the decisions that cannot be settled on paper are made.
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