NOT.O

Not.O is a company and a design brand with its roots and headquarters in Sicily. A brand free to express a creativity based on local production capacity and the traditions intrinsic in the local area, as well as being interested in exploring new and unexpressed ones. Not.O takes on the complex challenge of dealing with an ancient legacy and a very different dimension to the one designers usually work in, but which perhaps for this very reason is full of manufacturing and commercial potential. The project aims to revalue local craftsmanship by inscribing its contribution in an industrial product chain, something that inevitably requires an evolution to showcase its unique features while guiding it towards contemporary languages. Here are a few examples: we contacted decorators who usually work on traditional Sicilian carts and souvenirs to paint the design on the Ribera cabinet, and we asked the ceramists from Caltagirone who make moor’s head and decorative pinecone vases to express their virtuosity by creating the tiles featured on the sideboard of the same name.

Not.O furniture sicilian design

A project nurtured for three years before coming to fruition, it all began in 2018 in Taormina, with a chance meeting between Ferruccio Laviani and Felice Rizzotti. The first Not.O workshop took place over dinner, during which they both talked about their ideas and projects and discovered shared desires they thought it was worth exploring together. The natural consequence of this was the decision to try to channel their own particular shared vision of Sicilian design into a single project. They also shared the conviction that the venture must be highly distinctive and immediately attributable to Sicily, two characteristics embodied by Noto, a jewel of a city known all over the world, whose name that could have been thought up by a clever copywriter: short, immediate and easy to pronounce. It also proved to be the right choice because of the possibility of transforming the name Noto into a synthetic definition of the project, transfiguring the semantic spectrum of this traditional local toponym into an international and visionary Not Ordinary: Not.O.