the story of Baxter

This is a story about the feeling that Made in Italy design is able to evoke and about the balance of the ingredients that, like in a perfect recipe, make truly unique the experience of looking at an object, touching it and plunging into its mood. This is a story about furnishing, that, like our skin’s extensions, become leather, hide, turning into special clothes speaking about the passing of time and tracing the lines of the future.

This is a story about a family, one that orbits around two Italian enlightened entrepreneurs, Luigi and Paolo Bestetti; it’s about the DNA characterizing the Italian family companies, sprouting from the love of a material and carrying around the manufacturing culture.

This family story starts from the hide passion and grows thanks to the human capital, the people with whom you constantly work and measure yourself. This is a young story, dating back only to 1990, but looking way back in time, to a century-old entrepreneurial tradition, flourished on the Como Lake fertile land, that has always been producing the excellence in furniture for aristocracy first and middle class after, and that today pursues in its creations for all the beauty lovers.

This is a 100% Italian story beaming into an International panorama, one that starts from the reinterpretation of the English taste and evolves, through the art of leather working and shaping, into the production of unique collections.

This is the story of Baxter.

TO BE OR NOT TO BE... LEATHER?

Can the same material be truly faithful to itself and, at the same time, change into something completely different?

This is Baxter magic: choosing the full-grained, most exquisite leather, working it, keeping its qualities as a natural, transpiring, flexible, resisting, pleasant to the touch, distressed material, perfect in its imperfections that make it unique, and using it in unprecedented ways.

Everything begins with a travel, from the Northern European mountains to the Italian tannery districts. Thus, begins the second life of the first-choice leather, a creative adventure where the main actor is the hide and the main story is written by the artisans’ hands joined by the designers’ creativity.

The rest is the chronicle of a productive excellence. Relying on master tanners, keepers of ancient traditions, the hide is manipulated and dyed with natural anilines. In a harmonious balance between research and tradition, that finds in every chapter of this tale the concatenation between hand and machine, the experimentation is broaden to the employment of different materials that accompany it into its transformation.

The versatility, one of its great qualities, makes sure that it can be interpreted by the designers in unexpected ways, as if it was no longer itself. Being folded, sewed, pleated, screen-printed and polished, the hide is one and many, and, in its metamorphosis, it becomes: the tissue on which it is possible to duplicate vintage geometrical motifs; the shell of a suspending sitting that is not merely a covering but a structural element for the outdoor; a smooth velvet; a wrinkled fabric or one sewed with raw-cut edges.

The end of this tale sees our protagonist, the hide, deeply changed, but still recognizable in its quality. A noble element, intrinsic expression of unicity, always different and impossible to reproduce, proposed by Baxter in a new disguise, marvellous and tailored-made like a haute couture dress.

baxter’s climate house

“We have always focused very closely on the environmental impact of each aspect of our production and environmental sustainability is one of our leading principles.”
An attention proved by the voluntary subscription to the UNI EN ISO 14001 environmental certification since 2005 and by company headquarters thought and carried out according
to eco-sustainable criteria.

Baxter’s new premises, existing since 2011, is the first “Climate House” for public use in Europe certified in class A. It’s a workplace with a low environmental impact, where light, exposure to sunlight and materials create a high comfort and a symbiotic relationship with the surrounding environment.