Design studio Palma merges art and architecture

'Belisco' Floor Lamp, by Palma (Image credit: Courtesy of Palma)

Design studio Palma is the summation of two co-founders and, indeed, two disciplines. In 2020, artist Cleo Döbberthin and architect Lorenzo Lo Schiavo co-founded the São Paulo-based studio with a vision to establish a nonconforming, cross-pollinating practice – one where art and architecture share a single tactile language or as they put it, 'design as amalgamation'.

Get to know Palma, a design studio based on duality

In Brazilian Portuguese, palma means 'palm of the hand'. The studio took the power of this image for its namesake, reinforcing the duality at the heart – or rather, the hands – of its work.

Before co-founding Palma, Döbberthin studied Visual Arts at Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado (FAAP), where her practice began to question the conventions of architectural form. Given Döbberthin’s innate interest in the built environment, her creative partnership with Lo Schiavo felt inevitable.

The pair first met while studying architecture at Escola da Cidade in São Paulo. Lo Schiavo later continued his studies at the Architectural Association (AA) in London. The two reconnected some years later when Lo Schiavo was commissioned to design an immersive retail experience: knowing Döbberthin’s sculptural sensibility would be invaluable, he invited her to collaborate. The installation’s success revealed a shared understanding of material and spatial narrative – and Palma was, so to speak, in the palm of their hands.

'When we started Palma, this exchange of completely different experiences and material practices was very important,' says Lo Schiavo. 'My experience as an architect and designer combined with Cleo’s artist practice allowed us to expand the traditional boundaries of each field into a more experimental approach that still permeates Palma’s output.'

Palma’s practice pivots on paradox: accidental yet intentional, mathematical yet poetic. Their 2024 Belisco Floor Lamp embodies this balance – its geometric precision softened by sculptural tactility, an object oscillating between art and utility. But this dualism extends far beyond lighting.

'At Palma, being two people with different sets of references and researches, we are constantly trying to unite them and through this amalgamation joined with the material experimentation we do in the atelier: mistakes play an enormous part in our creative process,' Döbberthin explains, 'We are able to come up with new and unexpected ways of making and of expressing our creative will.'

Working across scales and typologies, Döbberthin and Lo Schiavo move fluidly between furniture, interiors, set design and architecture. For them, each project is both a fragment and a field – an exploration of proportion, gesture and touch. Their process is grounded in drawing, model-making and material testing, where the immediacy of the hand reveals new spatial possibilities.

This porous approach allows the studio to navigate between disciplines without hierarchy – a practice as comfortable sketching a pavilion as sculpting a handle. The result is work that feels both instinctive and deliberate, where form follows feeling as much as function.

Through Palma, Döbberthin and Lo Schiavo continue to build a world defined by dialogue – between art and architecture, left and right, thought and touch. Each project becomes a kind of palm reading: a tracing of where they’ve been, and where their hands – together – will go next.