Limn was conceived to deliver custom project solutions. However, it didn’t take long for us to realize that demonstrating our tastes and capabilities through our products would be wise. We began with 4 collections, designed at once and made together.

One might assume this was a thought-out product release strategy. The simpler truth is that our designer in Milan put the pedal to the metal. Ideas became pieces, pieces found relatives, and before long, four distinct families were growing. Simultaneously adjacent.

Collections allow designers and project teams to create continuity across a room, property or portfolio. They also give customization a coherent starting point. A piece can change in dimension, material or configuration while retaining the design logic from which it came.

Each collection needed an identity of its own while remaining recognizably part of Limn’s first set. Each piece should relate to the other, and itself, while dimensions, materials and details have to carry across many different forms without being overly repetitive (yikes!) or somehow drifting apart.

To anchor the project, we named the collections from four places in California: Ukiah, St Helēna, Pacifica and Inyo.

Together, they describe something of the state’s ecological range. Northern valleys and forests. Cultivated hills. A foggy and weather-beaten coast. High desert meeting the abrupt eastern wall of the Sierra Nevada.

These were not intended as literal design briefs. The collections do not directly illustrate the places for which they are named. The relationship is one of setting and character—a way of locating each family within a broader California point of view.

Ukiah draws its atmosphere from Northern California: valley, timber, mist and forest. Wood and joinery are especially present in the collection, sometimes emphasized through shifts in tone.

St Helēna occupies more cultivated ground. Its frames use structure and open space to hold upholstered forms with an appearance of suspension - like the trellised vineyards that dot its landscape. There is strength in the collection, but also lightness.

Pacifica belongs to the coast, where the name’s suggestion of peace meets the less peaceful realities of wind, fog and ocean. Its proportions are grounded and assured, comfortable in exposed settings and rooms of greater scale.

Inyo comes from the convergence of desert and mountain along California’s eastern edge. Broad horizontal distances meet the rising geometry of the Sierra. Intersecting planes and angles give the collection its particular structure.

The names differentiate the four without disconnecting them, all unique and equally part of a larger geography. The design work followed a similar pattern. Ukiah, St Helēna, Pacifica and Inyo developed their own forms and details while sharing an approach to material, craft and customization, and to a classic yet modern aesthetic.

Naming is one thing, but making is another – one of many iterations.

Moving from concept, to design intent, to technical drawings, to shop drawings, to rendering, to prototyping, and to the scrutiny and testing on the factory floor (we traveled 6 times in 18 months to the other side of the world) delivered a composite of learnings that we set into our foundation.

4 collections were 16x more work than one.

Making them gave us, from the beginning, a vocabulary and a language rather than a single word. More concretely, this experience pushed us to create a system and a software platform to deliver creativity, and precision, at scale.