Formafantasma Named Creative Directors of Santa Maria Novella

Formafantasma has been appointed Creative Director of Officina Profumo-Farmaceutica di Santa Maria Novella, placing Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin inside one of Florence's longest-running institutions — a company founded in 1221.

Eight centuries ago, Dominican friars cultivated medicinal herbs and prepared remedies on the site. That botanical knowledge became the foundation of a business that still produces fragrances, body products and preparations for the home. Now it will be filtered through the lens of one of the most analytically minded studios in contemporary design.

The mandate is broad. Formafantasma will work across products, packaging, communication, retail spaces and events, in dialogue with Santa Maria Novella's internal team and specialists from different disciplines. Rather than treating the appointment as an exercise in visual reinvention, the studio describes the product itself — its quality, materials and the expertise behind its production — as the starting point.

The archive as material

For Formafantasma, the attraction lies in the weight of what is already there. Santa Maria Novella's identity has developed through the accumulation of ingredients, formulations, techniques, objects and spaces, with knowledge transmitted and adjusted over generations. The studio sees this continuity not simply as heritage to preserve, but as material to question: what survives, what transforms and how an institution rooted in the 13th century continues to operate in the present.

That position aligns with Trimarchi and Farresin's long-standing interest in the histories carried by materials and systems of production. Their role at Santa Maria Novella will be less about imposing a single recognizable aesthetic than examining how the company's many expressions can speak more coherently to one another — from what sits inside a bottle to the box around it and the space in which someone eventually picks it up.

The studio approaches the Officina as an evolving archive rather than a fixed one.

No clean slate

Crucially, Formafantasma says its intention is not to redefine Santa Maria Novella through a new image. Instead, the studio wants to understand what has allowed the Officina to remain relevant since 1221 and use those conditions to inform its next chapter. That means looking at how its history is communicated, how new products are conceived and how physical spaces, objects and visual language can develop without reducing eight centuries to what the announcement calls "a particularly tasteful moodboard."

Santa Maria Novella frames the appointment in curatorial terms. "Their role will be that of curators, attentive to the knowledge the Officina has safeguarded for eight centuries," the company says, pointing to Formafantasma's multidisciplinary practice across product, space, research and exhibition design.

The brief is unusually clear from the outset: no clean slate, no heritage frozen behind glass, and plenty of history to work with. The first results of the collaboration have yet to be revealed, and the design world will be watching how a studio known for interrogating production systems applies that method to a living archive of botanical and craft knowledge.