Norwegian Functionality Meets Mediterranean Joie de Verve at Tille de Negro’s New Design Studio

Fresh off a trip to Paris for Art Basel, Tille del Negro joins Zoom looking effortlessly cool in a crisp white shirt and messy blunt bob. Through the computer, she shows del Negro Studio, the home base for her new Mallorca design firm, pointing out the area dedicated to artists in residence and the mountains outside, and offering a too-brief glimpse of countless intriguing objects (including a towering sculptural pepper mill). “It’s such a good space,” she says. “It’s really rare, actually, because in Mallorca, all of the houses are tiny, so to actually have a warehouse space is really rare, particularly with light.”

Open only a few months, del Negro Studio is off to an explosive start, with a wide range of projects—from raw stone-topped coffee tables to invitingly organic residential projects—already under the firm’s belt thanks to del Negro’s 15 years of experience and beautifully executed creations. “It’s like a little baby,” she says of the fledgling studio. “But also, I have designed this baby in my head for a long time. I’ve been thinking about it for a long time.

Portrait by Mario Sorrenti

Like many, del Negro’s path to design wasn’t linear. Though the Norwegian designer came from a family of creatives, their work in fashion didn’t appeal to her. Instead, she studied medicine, then law, before dating a graphic designer, which ultimately led her to creative direction. Her first big gig as a creative director was for a men’s sartorial brand, working with elegant structured fabrics. “I think that was a beautiful skeleton for understanding sculptural form and refinement and the beauty of materials,” del Negro says. “That’s one that kind of stuck with me.”

She met her now-husband, architect and founder of Moredesign Oro del Negro, in London, and the two began working together. “We were super creative, both of us—we were in art school—and we moved to Mallorca and got a tiny little apartment and had no money,” she says. Using their limited resources, they fixed the space up themselves and sold it for a profit. “That became what we did, which was a long time ago, but you know, we’re still doing it.”

Through the years at Moredesign, where she served as creative director of Moredecor, she worked on a wide range of projects, spanning hospitality, including the Belmond Legacy Hotel La Residencia and Hotel Corazón, residences, and objects. But as the firm grew and took on more projects, del Negro wanted to be able to give more to each new task she took on. “There’s a real intimacy in what we do, and that kind of detailing really needs love and focus and time,” she says. “Doing 20 product projects at the same time, you lose the essence of what we do. You’re rushing everything. You regurgitate a lot of information just because you need to do it really fast. It’s a pace that didn’t really suit me very well.”

It’s been what she calls a “soft transition” from Moredesign to del Negro, with the designer retaining many team members and clients—a perk of working with your husband. With business and love tied so closely, tension could easily brew. But the pair bring so much infectious excitement for each other’s creative endeavours, it seems a nonissue. “We stayed up till 4 in the morning last night talking, because we’re still doing new projects together,” she says. “We’re really figuring that part out, because we do love working together. We are so madly passionate about what we do.”

At del Negro, she applies that passion toward expanding her repertoire of spaces and objects. Expertly layering materiality, craftsmanship, and sculptural forms, her style is a graceful blend of the practicality of her Norwegian roots with the joie de verve of the Mediterranean she has long called home. “The Scandinavian world of design [is] very focused on functionality and simplicity,” del Negro says. “They really want things to be superfunctional. So you have to have a chair, and in that chair, you have to sit really, really, really well.” This, she adds, finds a natural continuation with the notoriously long Mediterranean dinners. “One of the things we do here is distil something, like the heritage of the furniture that has been produced here. Often, what we try to do is just to kind of bare it down to the real essence of it.”

And indeed, in all her work, what remains consistent is a remarkable sense of balance—old yet new, raw yet refined, practical yet beautiful, simple yet layered. Whether it’s the organic curves and soft limewashed surfaces of her Talana residential project, a clay and fine porcelain side table that extends into an amphora, or a linear dining chair made from walnut and local straw (the last two are part of her collection officially launching at the end of the year), each design feels innately and timelessly human, as if hewn from the earth and as likely to appeal to a fourth-century Roman emperor as a modern city dweller. Currently in the works: a dreamy domed bóveda mosquito net.

In many ways, it’s a bold move to launch a new endeavour with such a wide scope: architecture, interiors, furniture, and lighting all find themselves under del Negro Studio’s umbrella. But to del Negro, it’s creative freedom. “When we do a project, every item, every object, everything really has to flow together,” she says. “It can have its own character, and you can play with things, but it’s a language, and because I have an archive of thousands of things that I’ve designed through the years, they kind of move together like a family. So why narrow it down?”

Photographs by Salva Lopez.

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