Issue 07
Bottega Montana
By Daniel LichtermanPhotos By Bottega Montana
Portrait By Aaron Farley
Francesco and Marco Gillia are self-described LEGO kids, who, since childhood, have been fascinated by both the mechanical and artistic challenges of design. The transition from playing with colorful, interlocking Danish toy construction blocks to designing staggeringly elegant, high-design wood work seems almost predestined, considering their unique background and life decisions.
Born into a family of artists in Monte Porzio Catone, a small town near Rome, Italy, the Gillias were inspired by both the intense dedication and creative excitement of artisan craft. Surrounded by Classical structures for most of their lives, the brothers were reminded on a daily basis of the promise of functional art that continues to accumulate beauty and personality well beyond the lifespan of its creator.
Although they originally elected to pursue different components of design, with Francesco studying fine art and relocating to Southern California to work as a product designer and Marco developing an interest in technical engineering and joining an architectural firm in Monte Porzio Catone, the decision to create their own design studio, Bottega Montana, was the culmination of a shared dream of entrepreneurship and creative autonomy.
While working in Hermosa Beach for design firm Powerline 6 , Francesco witnessed several of his 23- and 24-year-old colleagues create the wildly successful shoe company Royal Elastics. Francesco concluded that America, with its apparent eagerness for young, innovative designers dedicated to solid craftsmanship, was indeed fertile soil for realizing the dream he and his brother shared. He called up his brother and said, “ Marco, get over here!”
After Francesco persuaded Marco to leave his job and travel to America, the question remained as to what the two brothers would actually design. The decision to create handmade wooden furniture with wooden joinery was reached as a form of self-imposed challenge, both artistically and structurally. Neither of the brothers had previous experience producing wooden furniture. The task of designing an entirely new table from American woods seemed to afford the maximum opportunity for true collaboration.
For the project to be successful, the Gillias would have to learn from each other, what Francesco calls“crossing over into each other’s maestranza,” and would be forced to trust their own artistic and engineering instincts for adjusting to the unique properties of their new medium: American oak and walnut. This process of self apprenticeship ultimately led the brothers to discover and patent a new and liberating system of wood joinery.
Marco and Francesco established their studio, Bottega Montana, in the wide-open expanse of Lima, Montana, where they could draw upon the serenity of the mountains and open space of the American West to maintain the intense focus necessary for their demanding craft (and Francesco’s fiancé not-so-incidentally happened to live there). The brothers are eager to share the story of their artistic journey and design process , and they speak with an effusiveness that seems at once both Italian and distinct to inhabitants of such expansive and geographically overwhelming American states as Montana and Alaska.
The brothers describe their designs as emerging organically from the structural properties of their medium, avoiding any extravagant accents that do not directly contribute to the integrity of the piece in an attempt to uphold the honesty of the design. “Every detail is there for a structural reason,”says Marco. “We just make sure that it looks good too.” Their tables draw influence from the narrow monastic dining tables they saw in Florence, which, for the brothers, express ed the beauty and dignity that arise from centuries of human and elemental wear upon a well-wrought tabletop.
The themes of legacy and innovation characterize both the Gillias’ artistic vision and their approach to woodworking. They describe their craft as requiring a combination of high-tech Italian tools and intensive old-world labor at various points in the construction process . Francesco stresses that there is an irreplaceable human component in the selection of materials for each piece: “Each piece of wood has it sown organic story that reflects in the grain, and the woodworker has to understand it and find the right use and fit, respecting the structural properties and showing the beauty of the wood.”
After the wood has been selected, high-tech machinery as well as handcrafted rasps are used to shape the wood with exacting precision. The final stage of the process , curing and finishing with tung oil, is the most time- and labor-intensive. These final details cannot be replicated by machine, and are essential for establishing the longevity of the brothers’ work and bringing out the natural grandeur of the wood itself.
The wooden joint system is an essential component of their miss ion to create enduring, living works of functional art. Wood is a material that breathes and warps at varying rates, depending on its environment and finish. Wood that is joined by metal will eventually damage itself through the warping and aging process .
The Gillias’ innovative system solves this problem by creating an organic connection between wooden pieces that affords the modern convenience of rapid assembly and disassembly of 300-pound tables with the simple tap of a wooden mallet.
After developing their four-joint system, Francesco and Marco directed their design efforts to an area completely un-colonized by the design community: long board skate decks. Francesco learned to long board while working in Hermosa Beach. Although Francesco loved the freedom of cruising and carving his way to work on an old-school long board deck, he found the construction somewhat underwhelming from an aesthetic perspective. “I thought to myself, ‘This ugly piece of plywood is. . . is junk.’” Together with Marco, he created a series of long boards using the same wedge tongue-and groove system of white oak and black walnut that they had perfected in their line of tables. The end result was a series of boards, undoubtedly the most beautiful and sophisticated custom decks to ever hit the market, that bear the regal names of a fleet of Italian ships: Torpediniera, Navetta, Corvetta, and Fregata. These decks come equipped with top-end trucks by Seismic. The Gillias explain that their deck designs provide a great deal of flexibility, while remaining stiff in the opening area to provide the rider with precise control while carving.
Francesco and Marco chose the name Bottega Montana as a direct reference to “the Renaissance concept of the Florentine bottega, where the artist worked in close association with hiss tudents and trainees. The bottega was a busy, active place, dedicated to creation and training, a place of movement, ideas, and experimentation.” Indeed, the Gillias’ collaboration has done much to erode the boundaries between artist and engineer that originally characterized their allocation of design responsibilities. There is a sense of common aesthetic sensibilities, trust, and honest communication that arises from the brothers’ shared background and familial bond