About
Andres Fravi is an upcycling designer based in St. Gallen. He works with materials that most people have already written off — a broken pallet, a pane of glass from a renovation, metal left over from another trade — and turns them into objects worth more than what they were before.
The approach is simple and stubborn: nothing is finished until it has been looked at a second time. A pallet becomes a piece of furniture. An old glass becomes a mirror. What stays visible is the history of the material — the marks, the grain, the wear — because that history is the point, not a flaw to sand away.
Growing up in Colombia, building and repairing things by hand was simply part of daily life — not a discipline, just how things got done.
Years spent cooking shaped the same instinct that drives the studio work today: use what is there, waste nothing, and give it time.
Travelling added techniques, materials and a wider sense of what an object can be.
Today the studio in St. Gallen produces one-off pieces and commissions — furniture, mirrors and lights, each made from material that already had a first life.