Povo is a name associated with the search for beauty, sensitivity and a passion for a job well done. The Povo family has walways looked at life trhough the prism of esthetics and with a view towards harmonizing their surroundings.
The Povos’ veins carry a special ability to express their Mediterranean character through art and design. Doing so intuitively and with emotion, the Povo have worked towards the cration of art and objects to embellish everyday life.
We should start the history of the Povos at the end of the 19th century, when Francisco Povo expressed his sensitivity through painting. He married Lola, a woman with graceful, nimble hands and an expert in creating and produncing hats for stars of the theater. Cruelfate look Lola too early, leaving the painter a widow and a father of three children. That is when the Povo moved to paris, like all true artists of that time.
Fernando’s brothers, all older and less introspective than he, needed to channel the passion of the Povo through their hands and so they became ironmongers. Fernando Povo, one of the three soons, would later incorporate that trade inro his designs, undertsanding that it was civilising work, maniuplating material to turn it into that which one deams. Fernando Povo understood that the manipulation of iron forms part of an ancestral desire to control the uncontrollable.
Fernando Povo left to find this fortune in Barcelona. With his inherited sensitivity and deftness for drawing, and his innate elegance in the proposal of new spaces, fernando made a name for himself in decorating and earned a good reputation among the intellectual and business elite in Barcelona. He soon started to design interiors for a variety of areas – shops windows, commercial premises, movie theaters and homes – even designing all the furniture, since interior design at that time involved the design of each and everyone of the space’s elements and deatils.
Fernando Povo fell in love with a young woman, Carme, who was sixteen years his junior. She possessed a profound spirituality, mixed with sensible mind for business taht would offset and complement Fernando’s esthetics, idealistic and fanciful bent. Carme and Fernando were one of those couples that work in tandem. A brilliant and prospereous pairing that not only gave rise to three children, but also founded a shop`in the oldest neighborhood in Barcelona in 1953 on Banys Nous street, a stone’s throw from the old Roman wall.
At the shop they sold antiques and Fernando’s designs, furnitures designed for customers at first and, soon after, new products to meet the demand from Barcelona’s bourgeoisie. The Povos then put together a team of artisans: wood workers, ironmongers, glassworkers, screen makers, among others. Thet team brought Fernando Povo’s dreams and drawings to life with the excellence that the Povo brand had alreadyrequired. From that time on, the Povo’s business would have one basic objective: to conceive and create designs for everyday life, without skimping on esthetics and quality of execution, because the Povos instinctively knew that art must be at the service of life.
The third generation carried on with their father’s passion for design and visual arts, incorporating their mother’s business sense ans entrepreneurial nature. Fernando and Carme’s three daughters each took their own path. The oldest, Gemma, got her degree in Fine arts and spacialized in the design of handcrafted products. She took over her father’s shop in 1979.
While studying FIne Arts at the university of Barcelona, Gemma Povo worked side by side with her father, who instilled in her the Povo spirit of interior decoration, design and production. The first flashes of a talent and success were seen in her designs foe leaded glass to be used in her father’s interior design projects. Soon, her sensibility ans esthetic vision melded with the overall Povo project, enhancing it with new, fresh ideas.
Over four decades, Gemma Povo crated new design lines: one contemporary, to complememnt FernandoPovo’s traditional prespective, and the other a specialcollection made up of one-of-a-king, totally unique pieces comprising the fusion and recycling of decontextualized antiques. Gemma Povo stillleads the teamof artisians located through Catalonia that produces Povo design.
The youngest generation of Povo designers, headed up by Gala Povo, Gemma’s middle daughter, is looking to go one step futher and bring these products – resulting from a passion for art and forges over generations, at the service of day by day living – to the entire world so that more people can enjoy this ancestral way of life in their own homes.
