For over a decade, Gabriella Marcella has built a creative practice rooted in the layered, color-saturated aesthetics of Risograph printing — a stencil-based duplication method prized by independent designers for its tactile imperfections and vivid ink overlays. Now, the founder of Glasgow-based Risotto Studio has translated that two-dimensional visual language into physical space, converting a 100-square-meter industrial unit into a permanent headquarters that doubles as production facility and sculptural installation.
The project occupies a former screen-printing workshop in Glasgow, a city whose post-industrial fabric has long provided affordable square footage for small creative enterprises. For Marcella, the move marks the end of a 14-year tenure at the Glue Factory, a creative hub she joined after graduating. The new space is designed to be flexible and open, replacing the rigid partitions typical of industrial layouts with a fluid, expressive environment that echoes the studio's signature bold stationery and graphic patterns.
From Tetris Blocks to Functional Core
At the center of the studio sits what Marcella calls "The Green Room" — a stepped, geometric volume that anchors the entire floor plan. Modeled in SketchUp and built by fabricator Alexander Garthwaite, the structure's interlocking forms are intentionally reminiscent of Tetris blocks, a visual metaphor that speaks to both playfulness and spatial efficiency. The unit is not merely decorative. It houses paper storage and the Risograph printers themselves, consolidating the studio's core production infrastructure into a single sculptural element. Its outer surfaces, meanwhile, serve as display platforms for three-dimensional works, effectively turning logistics into exhibition.
The approach reflects a design philosophy that has gained traction among independent studios in recent years: treating the workspace not as a neutral container but as an active participant in the creative output. Architecture firms and design collectives — from Assemble in London to Formafantasma in Milan — have explored similar territory, blurring the line between the space where work happens and the work itself. What distinguishes Marcella's project is its directness. The studio is not a collaboration with an external architect interpreting a brief; it is the designer's own spatial translation of a graphic vocabulary she has refined over more than a decade.
Industrial Reuse as Creative Statement
Glasgow's stock of disused industrial buildings has served as incubator space for generations of artists and makers. The city's relatively low commercial rents, compared to London or Edinburgh, have helped sustain a dense ecosystem of printmakers, ceramicists, and textile designers who depend on physical production infrastructure. Marcella's decision to acquire and redesign a permanent unit rather than continue occupying shared studio space signals a level of institutional confidence that remains uncommon among independent print studios, where precarious tenancies are the norm.
The choice of a former screen-printing workshop adds a layer of material continuity. Screen printing and Risograph printing share a mechanical logic — both push ink through a stencil onto a substrate — and the spatial requirements overlap: flat storage for paper, ventilation for ink drying, open floor area for collating and finishing. By retrofitting rather than building from scratch, the project also sits within a broader pattern of adaptive reuse that has become central to sustainable design discourse, where embodied energy in existing structures is preserved rather than discarded.
What makes the Risotto Studio headquarters worth watching is less any single design gesture than the proposition it embodies. The space argues that a small creative business can treat its physical environment with the same intentionality it applies to its printed output — that architecture, at modest scale and budget, can function as a manifesto rather than a backdrop. Whether that proposition scales, or whether it remains a compelling one-off tied to a specific designer's sensibility and a specific city's economics, is a question the studio's next decade of operation will answer on its own terms.
With reporting from Dezeen.
Source · Dezeen
