Kostantia Manthou

Manthou Project

Kostantia Manthou is a Greek architect. After working with the Campana brothers to develop an experimental furniture collection for a new hotel in Athens, she moved to Milan to study at SPD.

During her studies she took part in a special project with Poliform in 2011. Since then she has worked for architectural firms and participated several times in the Milano Design Week exhibiting her design work.

Manthou Forniture

Manthou Clock

Manthou Panel

Manthou Bread

Manthou Bread

Manthou Rings

Our ingredients were a classic but still contemporary piece to be reinvented (the Io wardrobe by Paolo Piva) and a company with a clean and precise image (Poliform). You cannot start with anything but the blank page syndrome, but for an entire month we actually lived inside the factory. It’s been like an awesome and intense boarding school of design.

A piece of furniture with two different personalities was an intriguing point. The Io storage system, which was our reference in the Poliform catalogue, was a slightly bigger architecture, like a boat that floats in a room. On a small scale Voi is everything that Io was, and even more, as it is an exploded storage facility that can hold clothes, papers, books, stools…

Honestly, after some years of practice within both disciplines, I think that design is a form of recreation for an architect. If it is not your main job, it’s like doing architecture in a smaller scale. And then it is your chance to be creative beyond rules and restrictions.