Search

A Day in the Life of Cardenio Petrucci

Today we hit San Francisco, California to spend the day with Cardenio Petrucci, founder and art director of Dsegnare. The Italian born Petrucci studied at Sapienza University in Rome and then at the Massachusetts College of Arts in Boston before landing at an engineering firm in London. In 2000, he opened Petrucci Design Group to cover interior design and remodeling projects in San Francisco, Miami, and Washington D.C. and began importing goods for them. So, to merge his Italian background and love of design, he opened Dzine in 2004, which became one of the most successful showrooms in the United States. Just recently, he opened Dsegnare, a new concept design and showroom in San Francisco’s SOMA neighborhood that presents “a unique balance of art, music, design, flavors and cultures.” This Designer Dailies lets us see how he spends his days.

Dailies-Cardenio-Petrucci-2-wakeup

Waking up the boys, Gianlorenzo and Emiliano. The little one wakes up before everybody else and functions as an alarm clock; once he gets his milk he helps me get the older one up!

Dailies-Cardenio-Petrucci-3-gym

GYM! I usually cycle for 20-30 mins to get warmed up while checking news and my emails. Of course always wearing the Lazio team jersey (below), the greatest football team of all times!

Dailies-Cardenio-Petrucci-4

Dailies-Cardenio-Petrucci-5-showroom

After dropping off the kids at school, I get to the showroom where I get my second coffee of the day.

Dailies-Cardenio-Petrucci-6-coffee

The girls at the Elite coffee shop are experts at latte art, and personalize my cup every morning (featured today is a doodle my girlfriend made up of my signature ‘whatchu-talkin-bout’ face).

Dailies-Cardenio-Petrucci-7-emails

I’m now ready to get to my desk and deal with the daily mountain of emails. Due to the time difference with Europe, there’s always a lot to go through by morning.

Dailies-Cardenio-Petrucci-8-employee

I then check in on the status of my employees’ work and make sure everything is going smoothly. Here, Claire is drawing up new plans for the showroom (stay tuned!).

Dailies-Cardenio-Petrucci-9-food-truck

Lunch time is always a good experience in SOMA, there are a bunch of food trucks around; we grabbed fish tacos today (and three dozen paper napkins) from the truck across the street.

Dailies-Cardenio-Petrucci-10-ceramicist

In the afternoon, our ceramicist Bruno Kark dropped off the latest batch of “Pills” designed by Claire and I, and we discussed the production of other pieces in the new DbyCP collection. Here, we are looking at ‘Now’ by Piero Lissoni, a beautiful but particularly challenging piece to fabricate.

Dailies-Cardenio-Petrucci-11-photoshoot

I then squeeze in a quick photoshoot for Western Interiors magazine.

Dailies-Cardenio-Petrucci-12-meetin

A quick pow-wow with teammate Michael Woods, the owner of Elite Audio we share our showroom with.

Thank you, Cardenio!

Caroline Williamson is Editor-in-Chief of Design Milk. She has a BFA in photography from SCAD and can usually be found searching for vintage wares, doing New York Times crossword puzzles in pen, or reworking playlists on Spotify.