Origins
Over a century ago, Benvenuto Acerbis gave his name to an artisan workshop dedicated to creating art furniture. Descending from a family with ancient roots, Benvenuto, known as Nuto, an orphan since the age of six, as a kid went to work to learn the art of carpentry, to which he dedicated himself to for his entire life.
The natural artistic capability of Benvenuto, united with the constant study of the most rigorous technique of “building well”, allowed him to start up his own activity making the first all-wood furniture in the classical and simple Lombard style. His curiosity for forms of style that were always new brought him to study the currents of the schools that were more in vogue at the time, re-interpreting them in an eclectic manner. A never-ending search for quality and the use of the most prestigious essences allowed him to create real works of art.
The furniture of Benvenuto Acerbis, prestigious objects of desire for the most important Families of the Bergamo area, soon became furniture items in luxury and elegant homes, and are now, in our times, looked for antique objects jealously guarded by the fortunate owners. With the same passion and ability of the father, Marino, the third to last of his twenty-one children, integrated the workshop with electric and mechanical machinery, continuously respecting the much-appreciated manual technique that always characterized the works of the father, Benvenuto.
Life soon took young Marino through the mill: the premature loss of his father prompted him to grow preciously, giving him the responsibility of perpetuating a precious inheritance.
Through his suffering he developed a particular empathy that made him a person careful to other people’s needs, an attribute that he knew how to invest on a daily basis also in his profession of artisan.
This is how Marino sensed that new needs were driving a society that was changing and that it was time to study new technologies to manipulate innovative materials in order to improve the use of living spaces. Towards this end, he provided his carpentry shop with an internal technical office and first painting department to test new color techniques to apply to the prestigious essences.
When the Second World War erupted this first wave of change suffered a sudden blow. Marino therefore thought of distinguishing himself by producing an exclusive, limited edition line of “furniture for radios, record-players and bars”. Its strong innovative drive in a period in which the radio was the most technological communication mean made this piece of furniture a success.
To an object thought of only for its functionality, he added an element of quality aesthetics, making this a successful product at a time in which the combination of record player, radio and bars gave rise to an exclusive object, present only in the homes the elite of Italian families.
Despite the historical difficulties of the time, Marino managed to guarantee a healthy survival of the company, not only staying one of the few Italian realities dedicated entirely to the Tailor-Made product, but also making Acerbis furniture a synonym of style, quality, innovation and attention to the client.
Expansion
In the 1950s, the new concept of furniture, which timidly started before the war, resumed its development, with the addition of new intuitions and stimuli inspired by the drama of life. This paved the way towards a real culture of the project: the Italian design.
During the Italian economic boom, Marino took this entire system of life in and applied it not only to living spaces, in luxury villas and private apartments, but also to public spaces like stores, jewelries, residences, luxury hotels, convents and oratories, going beyond regional boundaries. This began fertile years of gratifying experiences and brilliant results characterized by collaborations with prestigious Italian architects, bearers of values of research, placing next to a production of high-mastery an equivalent sophisticated creative work. One of these collaborations, at the beginning of the 1960s, gave rise to the Clusane experimental pre-fabricated home, planned by architect Tito Spini and used as a case-study to mass-produce homes.
A project that was unique in its kind, ambitious and innovative, able to correspond new life-styles and behaviors. The home was made entirely out of larch wood treated with special paints for boats on the part left natural and with integrated axes in the main body to apply the spot lighting.
Tito Spini remembered with enthusiasm the production of the project, attributing to Mr. Acerbis the merit of the entire wooden production, as well as the assembly of the entire structure: “Without the precious collaboration of Mr. Acerbis,” he said during a press conference held at the time “the home would never have stood. Demanding preliminary technical and planning studies and high-mastery of the wooden parts were required for the production of the entire work of art.”
All of Marino’s collaborators shared the esteem and fondness that can be perceived in the words of Mr. Spini and all the professionals that over the years worked with him describe him as a good man of sound moral principles and great humanity, dedicated to work and family. His activity was certainly noteworthy and he was awarded several recognitions, titles and honors, the most important of which was the nomination as “Knight of the Italian Republic by the President of the Republic of the time, Antonio Segni, with a decree dated “Rome, December 24, 1963”.
This long period ended with the handing over to the third generation in the person of Giovanni, known as Gianni, the youngest of his seven children, who, playing as a child with his brothers in the family carpentry store, grew with several stimuli to creativity and with an unconditional love towards the craft of a carpenter to which he dedicated himself for his entire life.
Gianni was just a kid, but well-determined, when, in his free time from his studies as cabinetmaker and designer, he decided to become also a carpenter acquiring experience within his father’s company to learn, from the roots, the construction techniques of the family art handed over from one generation to the next. When he was twenty-five his knowledge on the subject was so developed and heterogeneous that he felt a strong desire to apply himself in his own business experience. Gianni therefore proposed to his father Marino to transfer the company to the current headquarters in Nembro, making it bigger and organizing it with the best machinery.
Today
The proposal was accepted with great enthusiasm and therefore in 1974 Gianni created the new-born company that, in the honor of his father, took on the name of Acerbis Marino: one of the few activities left in Italy dedicated to a high-mastery production that is entire and exclusively Tailor-Made. The fortunate important collaborations with important Architects, famous at an international level, strengthened over time, giving room to constant innovative ideas and prestigious productions. Years of fruitful experiences and results followed. To date, Gianni treasuring his father’s teachings manages to maintain a lively dialogue between tradition and modernity with an unchanged respect for style and quality. Starting from a vivid sense of proportion and aesthetics, he transforms the project that he is given into an individual research, offering optimal customized solutions, fully satisfying Clients and their needs. Therefore, the full development of the entire furniture system, where the quality of the product is not limited to the object itself: the creation of a furnishing is understood, in fact, as an entire system of life, that of the Italian Lifestyle. Carpenter, cabinetmaker, expert in applying paint and able processor of production projects, Gianni also applies his professionalism in the contract sector with the same unchanged success.