Formafantasma named creative directors of Santa Maria Novella

Officina Profumo-Farmaceutica di Santa Maria Novella has named Simone Farresin and Andrea Trimarchi of Formafantasma its new creative directors. The pair will work across products, packaging, communication, retail spaces and events at the Florentine house, which describes itself as the oldest continuously operating pharmacy in the world.

The brand says the choice rests on Formafantasma's multidisciplinary approach, which moves between product, space, research and exhibition, and on an attention to materials and sustainability it says reflects its own values. Formafantasma have built their reputation on exactly that combination of design and material research.

An apothecary founded in 1221

Santa Maria Novella began as a convent apothecary run by Dominican friars in 1221, making it roughly 800 years old. It first gained renown across Europe for a rose water disinfectant made to help prevent the spread of plague, a use the brand traces to its earliest years.

The house later created Acqua della Regina, or Queen's Water, for Catherine de' Medici before she left Italy to become Queen of France. The brand's own account of the appointment points to that scent as an early instance of what would now be called a signature fragrance.

Over the centuries the product range has expanded well beyond that original apothecary, but the brand has held onto products grounded in traditional methods, packaging with an old-world apothecary charm, and stores decorated in a Neo-Gothic style. Formafantasma inherit that visual language rather than replacing it.

What Formafantasma say they will do

Farresin and Trimarchi say their aim is not to give Santa Maria Novella a new image but to build on what already exists. "Our intention is not to redefine Santa Maria Novella through a new image, but to build from what already exists," the pair said, adding that they want to understand what has kept it relevant since 1221.

In practice, the pair say this means examining how the brand's history is communicated, how new products are developed, and how the different parts of the company can form a coherent whole. They describe the product itself as the primary point of departure for all of that work.

The pair frame the Officina as defined less by its longevity than by the accumulation and transmission of knowledge across generations. Working with that accumulation, they say, raises questions close to their own practice: how it is preserved and transformed, and how materials carry their own histories.

Formafantasma also frame the appointment as a question about their own legacy going forward, asking how an institution can advance without treating its past as static. For the studio, previously named Wallpaper's designers of the year, the role marks a further expansion of its global footprint beyond furniture, exhibitions and research projects.

Why a design studio, not a beauty executive

The appointment is unusual in that it hands creative control of a fragrance and beauty house to a studio best known for furniture, exhibitions and material research rather than a background in cosmetics or perfumery. The brand has framed the fit as a matter of shared values around materials and craft rather than category experience.

We have covered how creative direction now operates across luxury outside its usual training grounds, including how Maria Gangemi built M.Gemi's design approach outside the traditional shoe industry playbook and how Katerina Leroy has shaped digital creative direction for luxury houses. Both cases involve outsiders reshaping how a heritage or growth brand presents itself.

That pattern, of bringing designers from outside a category's usual training ground into its top creative role, runs through our coverage of business in luxury and how houses choose who shapes their products and image. Santa Maria Novella's move places an 800 year old pharmacy inside that same debate.

Santa Maria Novella has not said when Formafantasma's changes will become visible in stores or on shelves, nor detailed which products or spaces will be reworked first. The brand's statement stops at describing the scope of the role and the reasoning behind the hire.

What is confirmed is the breadth of the mandate: products, packaging, communication, retail spaces and events all fall under the new creative directors, across a company whose Neo-Gothic stores and traditional formulations have defined it for centuries. How quickly that mandate becomes visible is the open question.