"Making is thinking." With this simple statement, sociologist Richard Sennett captures one of the central ideas of The Craftsman: every object emerges from a continuous dialogue between practice, technique and thought. Few observations describe the Italian manufacturing landscape more accurately - a system built on thousands of small and medium-sized family businesses where industrial knowledge is passed down long before business strategies are. Within these companies, generational succession is never simply about replacing leadership; it is about reinterpreting a legacy of skills, materials and relationships. QuadroDesign belongs precisely to this tradition.

“The only real certainty we had was what we knew how to do as a family.”

— Enrico Magistro

Like many Italian manufacturing stories, its origins are rooted in migration, sacrifice and an intimate understanding of making. In 1978, Carmelo Magistro and his wife Giuliana founded Rubinetterie Magistro in San Maurizio d'Opaglio, on the shores of Lake Orta, one of Europe's historic districts for tap manufacturing. Growing within this unique industrial ecosystem, the company developed a remarkable technical expertise that would become its most valuable asset. Yet it was with the arrival of the second generation that the story took a different direction. Elena and Enrico Magistro understood that the value of a company lies not only in its ability to manufacture exceptional products, but also in its capacity to transform that expertise into a broader design vision. That vision became QuadroDesign.

The transformation was never simply about changing a name or adopting a new aesthetic language. It redefined the company's starting point. If taps had once been the centre of its research, stainless steel gradually became the real protagonist. No longer just a technical material, it became a design language in its own right. This shift opened the company to a new generation of collaborations, where design is not treated as an author's signature but as an opportunity to explore the possibilities of steel.

“Working with designers happened almost by chance.”

— Enrico Magistro


One of the clearest expressions of this approach is the collaboration with Andrea Ferrari and NM3, which resulted in OG–NM301. More than a stool, it represents a change of perspective. Designed to move seamlessly between outdoor environments and domestic interiors, it transfers the same manufacturing expertise developed through tap production into the world of furniture. Structural precision, formal restraint and long-term durability remain unchanged; only the context evolves. The project demonstrates how industrial know-how can transcend the product category from which it originated, becoming a design methodology rather than a manufacturing specialisation.

The same attitude defines QuadroDesign's dialogue with Formafantasma, one of the studios that has most profoundly reshaped contemporary discussions around design, industry and ecology. Their collaboration led to FFQT, a collection of taps that deliberately rejects expressive gestures in favour of permanence, precision and everyday use. These are objects that do not seek attention; instead, they quietly support domestic life, allowing the material, its function and the passage of time to define their character.

This philosophy finds one of its most compelling expressions in Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin's private home in Milan. Here, the FFQT collection and the shower system developed with QuadroDesign become integral parts of an interior built around material continuity and an essential way of living. Nothing is conceived as decoration. Every component participates in a coherent ecosystem where architecture, furniture and objects share the same design philosophy.

The exploration of essentiality continues through the collaboration with Philippe Malouin, the Canadian designer renowned for reducing objects to their most fundamental expression. With HUM, Malouin starts from the simplest possible element - a stainless-steel cylinder, and introduces a single, subtle curve that defines the entire collection. The result is a family of products stripped of any unnecessary gesture, allowing the material itself to communicate the project.

A similar vision informs QuadroDesign's collaboration with Very Simple: Kitchen, the modular kitchen system designed by Finemateria. Rather than simply supplying technical components, QuadroDesign engages with a project that shares the same principles of structural clarity, modularity and material honesty. Stainless steel becomes common ground, demonstrating how the company's design language can naturally extend beyond the bathroom into a broader understanding of domestic space.

Perhaps the most unexpected chapter of this journey is the collaboration with Simone Bonanni. Together they developed a small collection dedicated to everyday rituals, including a Palo Santo holder and incense holders. Blocks of stainless steel, machined with the same industrial precision found throughout QuadroDesign's production, are transformed into contemplative objects intended to accompany slower, more personal moments. It is a striking change of scale that shows how truly mature the company’s research efforts have become: it is not enough anymore for steel to perform well; it must now be able to create new experiences and rituals.



Many companies speak about innovation as though it requires breaking away from the past. QuadroDesign suggests a different possibility. Innovation can also mean continuing an existing dialogue, simply moving it towards unexplored territories. That is perhaps the rarest quality of the Italian family business when it succeeds in reinventing itself—not preserving tradition as something static, but keeping it alive through constant reinterpretation.

“Sustainability is perhaps the true foundation of our company, together with our relationship with the territory we come from.”

— Enrico Magistro

After all, if every good craftsman conducts a dialogue between practice and thinking, isn't that also the task of every company that hopes to endure?

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Words: Simone Lorusso