Brothers Serhii and Oleksandr of Levantin Studio on craft, cultural layering, and the home as a place where design is allowed to stay.
In an era when design too often navigates between smooth functionality and aesthetic pleasantness, Levantin Studio arrives as something altogether different — a passionate manifesto of otherness. Founded by brothers Serhii and Oleksandr, the studio is not the product of a strategic business plan but the organic continuation of a familial energy: born from a shared respect for craftsmanship, poetry, and cultural depth.
Their philosophy has a name: "Wow in your space." And there is genuine substance behind the declaration. Their work carries an expressive emotionality that does not simply furnish a room but enters into conversation with it. Their designs move elegantly between object, sculpture, and everyday item. The starting point is rarely a function — it is a feeling, an impulse. A line that wants to be touched. A form that first emerges intuitively in a sketchbook before it finds its way into material. "Every object is a narrative, an encrypted message with room for personal stories and global context," the brothers explain. That narrative impulse is precisely what defines their formal language.
For Levantin Studio, materials are not passive carriers — they are co-authors. Wood, marble, metal, recycled plastic: each brings its own language, its own history, its own resistance. This approach is both a homage to craft and an ecological statement. Many of their pieces are created in collaboration with local workshops, using regional resources, with a conscious awareness of the environments in which design is born — and in which it is meant to act.
Though Levantin Studio works today at the heart of the Italian design landscape, their roots lie in post-Soviet aesthetics — in the raw honesty of brutalism, the metaphysics of in-between spaces, the symbolism of industrial relics. This cultural layering forms their unmistakable perspective: a fusion of Italian refinement and Eastern European depth, of irony, intuition, and intellectual complexity. Two sensibilities that, in their hands, do not compete but compose.
For the creative duo, Milan is not a place — it is a state of being. During Design Week in particular, the city becomes a vibrating organism that nourishes, challenges, and propels them. Whether in the halls of the Salone or among the poetic installations of the Fuorisalone, what counts for Levantin is never merely the object — it is the feeling. Tactility. Stillness. Resonance. Particularly significant this year was the installation Ritrovarsi by Paola Lenti — a quiet plea for rediscovery, for inner dialogue. It was Lenti, too, who once opened the door for the brothers into Italian furniture production, an act of trust that continues to shape their path today.
Moving through their objects, one discovers allusions, ironic undertones, and cultural references layered with care. The Paninaro armchair carries the spirit of 1980s street aesthetics like an oversized puffer jacket — deliberately imperfect, free, and charmingly rebellious. The Nappa Chair, meanwhile, is a winking homage to the Tuscan dialect reading of "big nose," uniting volume, comfort, and cultural subtlety in a single iconic piece. These are not merely seats. They are sentences.
Levantin Studio remains, above all, a laboratory of the new. Through collaborations with architects such as Stefano Ollino, through experiments with patinated metals and volcanic stone, Serhii and Oleksandr are guided not by trend but by depth. "We believe that true inspiration comes when you remain childlike in your curiosity — open to the world, capable of wonder, and ready to listen: to the space, to the materials, to the people," they say.
And what does all of this mean for the home? For both designers, it is stage and refuge in equal measure. A place that does not dictate but receives. That makes room for sketches, prototypes, and mistakes — but also for intimacy and rediscovery. For Levantin Studio, home is not the absence of design but its innermost essence. A place where design is allowed to emerge — and allowed to stay.
Levantin Studio is based in Milan. Discover their work at levantin.it