Artemest Teams with Gachot for a Debut Collection of Artisan-Crafted Furniture
At Milan Design Week, the Italian design marketplace will unveil a 36-piece range developed with John and Christine Gachot that combines the ease of a well-traveled living room with traditional techniques perfected by Italian masters
In just over a decade, Artemest has emerged as one of today’s leading champions of Italian craft. Creative director Ippolita Rostagno and CEO Marco Credendino founded the design marketplace as a unique purveyor of finely crafted Italian furniture to help protect the country’s artisanal traditions from disappearing and connect global design tastemakers with exceptional makers. It now partners with and supports hundreds of master workshops, operates a stylish galleria in New York and a London penthouse, and draws enthusiastic crowds at Milan Design Week with its popular L’Appartamento presentation. The company is expanding its stewardship even further by launching the Artemest Collection, its first proprietary furniture line.
The program introduces original artisan-crafted furnishings under the Artemest brand, each developed in collaboration with a leading interior designer. It signals a shift for the platform from a curatorial force to a producer while advancing its underlying mission to sustain Italian craft traditions. “When an artisan works on a piece designed in collaboration with an international studio, they’re absorbing a new way of thinking about space, proportion, and the needs of clients on the other side of the world,” Rostagno says. “That exposure makes them better, more versatile, and more relevant, and workshops producing the collection can keep young people in the trade rather than losing them to other industries.”
Kicking things off is a collection by Galerie Creative Mind firm Gachot, the New York practice of husband-and-wife duo John and Christine Gachot, who have imbued some of the city’s most sought-after addresses—Pendry Manhattan West, the Metropolitan Opera patrons’ lounge—with a tactile blend of warm minimalism mixed with dashes of theatricality. Beyond utilizing the marketplace to source rarefied pieces for their soigné interiors, the Gachots already shared deep ties to the Artemest universe: The duo orchestrated a decadent courtyard for L’Appartamento at Milan Design Week in 2024. “What always stood out was their obsessive attention to detail and the integrity they bring to every project,” says Artemest co-founder and CEO Marco Credendino. “They understood immediately what we were trying to achieve.”
The Gachots formulated the collection’s 36 pieces in the spirit of the living room of their Sutton Place apartment, which they furnished with vintage armchairs, a sleek cinnamon velvet sofa, and a black lacquer cocktail table beneath a gilded work by Nancy Lorenz. Several pieces traveled across multiple moves and harmonized serendipitously along the way—exactly the dynamic they set out to achieve in the Artemest Collection. That philosophy arose from the itinerant couple (Christine pens a column for Galerie about her favorite hotels) viewing their living room as a fluid, ever-evolving concept. “[It] has never been confined to one place,” they say. “It becomes wherever we are, whether in our home, a cherished hotel lobby, or side-by-side at a restaurant.”
That perception translates handsomely to the furniture, which was produced across multiple workshops and fashioned by masterful artisans who have dedicated their lifetime to perfecting techniques across wood, leather, cast glass, and fine metalwork. “Italian furniture brands have always been extraordinarily good at one thing: the product. The craftsmanship, the material, the object itself,” Rostagno explains. “What we’re trying to focus on is the space the product lives in, and more importantly, the dialogue between the maker and the designer who conceives that space. We saw a gap there that nobody was filling.”
The Gachots describe the designer-artisan relationship as key to the ideation process—as was imbuing each piece with a sense of restraint and warm hospitality. Americana and Art Deco references surface subtly across the collection, which encompasses an understated club chair upholstered in honeyed brown fabric, an ebonized walnut bench with an intrecciato-inspired leather seat, and a lacquered side table that resembles one in their living room. One piece even evokes the spirit of a mahogany Frank Lloyd Wright Taliesin desk the couple scooped from the Chelsea Flea three decades ago. Other pieces include crackled glass vases, metallic sconces and table lamps, leather magazine racks, decorative wood trays, and a three-seater sofa.
“The collection is deeply inspired by our personal way of living, our strong sense of family, our love of entertaining and hospitality, and our passion for travel and hotels,” the Gachots say, describing an open invitation to “pull up a chair” built into the work. The couple envisions the furniture to support daily life while encouraging conversation and easy movement from one setting to another—much like the atmosphere of their own living room. “There’s nothing contrived about it,” they continue. “It’s effortless, welcoming, and meant to be lived with.”
The collection will debut in an exclusive preview during Milan Design Week at Palazzo Donizetti, where Artemest will present its latest edition of L’Appartamento and celebrate the inaugural Champions of Craft program, which recognizes vanguard studios committed to exceptional making. Naturally, the Gachots count among the first inductees.