Luciano Frigerio Biography
Luciano Frigerio (Desio, 21 May 1928 – Sanremo, 11 April 1999) was an Italian designer, artist and musician. Luciano Frigerio was born in Desio in 1928. His father Giovanni started a high-quality artisan cabinet-making workshop in 1889. Luciano attended nursery school at the Paola di Rosa College in Desio, where he found Tommaso Giussani as a classmate who would later be named Monsignor during his ecclesiastical career. This friendship and mutual esteem will consolidate over time so much so that Monsignor Giussani himself commissioned in 1982, for Pope John XXIII, two lecterns which are still visible in the Basilica of St. Peter and Paul in Rome, positioned under Bernini's altar. Luciano Frigerio completed his technical-administrative studies at the Collegio Pio XI, graduating in accounting and cultivating two great passions since his adolescence: furniture design and composition for music. Over the years, collaboration began with some famous Italian architects and designers including Franco Albini, Sergio Asti and later Paolo Portoghesi. Luciano Frigerio asks them to design furniture that can be made in the workshop, from artisan specifications, with numbered and signed series with the belief that an architect can also design a piece of furniture as a unique piece of high quality cabinet making and not just furniture for industrial production. This philosophy led the company from the 1970s to the 1990s to the opening of ten showrooms in the major Italian cities, including the one in via Montenapoleone in Milan where at the time even high fashion designers had artisan tailoring shops. In 1989 he was appointed Knight of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulcher of Jerusalem.