Alpi

ALPI makes no furniture. It makes the material others build furniture from: reconstituted wood veneer, produced by dyeing sheets of wood and reassembling them into blocks that yield species, patterns and colours found nowhere in nature.

The process starts with an even-pored timber, poplar, lime or African ayous, sliced into thin leaves, dyed right through by immersion, then stacked and pressed to a defined pattern. The result is a new log, which is sliced in turn. The grain is drawn rather than inherited, and that has one decisive consequence on site: the material repeats from batch to batch, which natural veneer never guarantees.

Pietro Alpi opened the workshop in Modigliana, in Romagna, in 1919. The move to industry came in the 1950s, and ALPIlignum, launched in 1961, is described as the first industrial production of reconstituted wood anywhere. To secure raw material, the company opened a plant in Cameroon in 1975 and now manages around 500,000 hectares of forest concessions, FSC-certified in 2023. Piero Lissoni has been art director since 2015 and designed the Xilo 2.0, Tarsie and Ikat collections; Ettore Sottsass, Kengo Kuma, Patricia Urquiola and Konstantin Grcic have also worked with the company.

Artopia carries ALPI in Geneva, for interior architecture projects where the surface is chosen before the furniture.