A Double-Side Divider to separate the Stairway
In a new-construction architect’s home in San Francisco, the most important piece of furniture is not against a wall. It is the wall — or rather, it is the thing that stands exactly where a wall would have been, and does everything a wall cannot.
This project began with a problem that every open-plan home eventually has to solve. The architecture is deliberately contemporary and deliberately open: clean volumes, generous glazing, and the kind of uninterrupted flow that modern San Francisco living demands. But an open plan still has to be lived in. The stairway and the living room shared a single continuous space, and without some kind of separation the two zones bled into each other — the living room felt exposed to the traffic of the stair, and the experience of climbing the stairs was flat, with no sense of arrival or transition. The instinct of a less confident designer would be to build a partition wall. That would have solved the separation and destroyed everything else: the light, the openness, the sense of one breathing volume.
Instead, the answer was a double-sided bookshelf divider built from the San Giacomo Lampo collection, finished in a layered combination of matt lacquers. It is the piece that makes the whole floor work — and it is, quietly, the most beautiful object in the house.
The Brief: Separate Without Closing
The design challenge was unusually precise, and worth stating plainly, because the entire success of the piece comes from how exactly it answers it.
The divider had to do four things at once. It had to define the boundary between the stairway and the living room, so each space felt like its own room with its own purpose. It had to preserve light and openness, never blocking the flow of daylight across the floor or making either side feel boxed in. It had to transform the experience of the staircase, turning an ordinary climb into something with rhythm and atmosphere. And on the living-room side, it had to be warm and genuinely functional — real storage, real display, a piece the family uses every day rather than a sculptural object they tiptoe around.
A solid wall does the first and fails the other three. A flimsy open shelf does the second but none of the rest. What the home needed was a structure intelligent enough to be solid and transparent at the same time — to read as a defined edge from one angle and as open, light-filled space from another. That is precisely what Lampo, used as a freestanding double-sided system, was built to do.
Why Lampo
San Giacomo has been making living systems in the Friuli region of northeast Italy since 1968, and Lampo is the collection where their thinking about the living space is most fully expressed. It is a modular system in the truest sense — not a fixed product you select from a catalogue, but a kit of architectural parts from which a unique composition is designed for a specific space.
A few qualities made it the only real candidate for this job.
First, the construction. Lampo’s open units are built with 45-degree mitered joints, which means the structure has no visible frame, no clunky edge, no thick border interrupting the line. Each shelf and upright reads as a crisp, continuous plane of color. For a piece meant to be seen from both sides and from every angle in an open-plan room, that frameless precision is essential — there is no “back” of this bookcase, no unfinished side to hide. It is resolved on every face.
Second, the modularity. Lampo offers an enormous range of widths, heights, and depths, and lets open shelving, closed storage, and display compartments be mixed within a single composition. That flexibility is what allowed us to design a piece that behaves differently on each of its two sides — open and airy where it faces the stair, warm and functional where it faces the living room — while remaining one coherent object.
Third, the finishes. Lampo is offered in a deep palette of matt lacquers, and matt was non-negotiable here. In a home with this much natural light and glazing, a glossy finish would have thrown glare and cheapened the effect. The matt lacquers absorb light softly, hold their color with a velvety depth, and give the whole piece the quiet, architectural quality that a contemporary San Francisco interior asks for. The ability to combine several matt tones in one composition — rather than settling for a single flat color — is what gave the divider its richness.
The Stairway Side: An Atmosphere You Climb Through
Approach the piece from the stairway and the experience is almost theatrical.
Because the divider is open — composed largely of Lampo’s frameless mitered shelving rather than solid panels — it never reads as a wall closing you in. Instead, it filters. As you climb, the living room reveals itself in glimpses through and between the shelves: a slice of the sofa here, a line of afternoon light there, the changing view shifting with each step you take. The piece turns the ascent into a sequence rather than a transit. You are not simply going up; you are moving through a layered, dimensional screen, and the room beyond unfolds gradually rather than all at once.
The matt lacquers do something specific from this side. We layered the tones so the composition has depth and shadow — recesses that read darker, faces that catch the light — and the result is that the divider looks different depending on where you stand on the stair. Lower down, you read the full grid of the structure. Higher up, the angles compress and the colors stack into a kind of abstract composition. It is the sort of detail that rewards living with it: the piece is never quite the same twice, and the daily climb up the stairs becomes a small, recurring pleasure rather than a non-event.
This is what the brief meant by “a very special atmosphere while climbing the stair.” It was achieved not with decoration, but with structure — with the way open shelving, mitered precision, and layered matt color interact with movement and light.
The Living Room Side: Warmth, Function, and Light Kept Intact
Turn to the living-room face and the same object presents a completely different character — warmer, more grounded, more useful.
Here the composition is weighted toward function. We brought in closed Lampo base units for the things a living room needs to put away and not look at, balanced against open compartments sized for books, art, ceramics, and the objects a family actually wants on display. The mix is deliberate: enough closed storage to keep the room calm and uncluttered, enough open display to keep it warm and personal. A bookshelf that is all open shelving becomes visual noise; one that is all closed doors becomes cold. Lampo’s modularity let us tune the ratio exactly, so the living-room side feels collected and human rather than either chaotic or clinical.
Crucially, none of this comes at the cost of light or space — the two things the open plan exists to protect. Because the upper portion of the divider remains open and the structure itself is slim and frameless, daylight passes straight through it. The living room never feels walled off from the rest of the floor; it feels defined, which is different. You gain a sense of room and enclosure without losing a single foot of the openness or a single beam of the San Francisco light that the architecture was designed around. The divider gives the living room its own identity while leaving the volume whole. That is the quiet magic of the piece, and the hardest part of the brief to deliver.
Light as Part of the Architecture
A divider this central to the home could not be lit as an afterthought, so lighting was designed into the piece itself. Lampo’s integrated LED system runs discreetly within the structure — soft horizontal light washing along the shelves, vertical light bringing the display compartments to life. The fittings are concealed; you see the glow, never the source.
After dark, this is what makes the divider extraordinary. As the daylight fades and the open plan would otherwise flatten into a single dim space, the divider lights up from within and becomes the luminous heart of the floor. From the living room it glows warmly, turning books and objects into a softly lit display. From the stairway it becomes a lantern you climb beside, the layered shelves throwing gentle light and shadow as you move. The piece that defines the space by day becomes the piece that animates it by night. The lighting is not a feature added to the bookcase; it is part of how the bookcase does its job.
The Matt Lacquer Combination
It is worth dwelling on the finish, because the combination of matt lacquers is what elevates this from a well-made bookcase to something that feels custom and considered.
Rather than a single color, the composition layers several matt lacquer tones across its open structure, its closed units, and its shelves. This does two things. Visually, it gives the piece depth and movement — the eye reads it as a composition rather than a slab, with lighter and darker passages that create rhythm across both faces. Functionally, it lets the two sides relate to their two different rooms: the tones can lean cooler and more graphic toward the architectural stairway, warmer and more grounded toward the lived-in living room, while remaining unmistakably one object. The matt surface ties it all together with that soft, glare-free, deeply pigmented quality that reads as expensive precisely because it is so restrained. In a contemporary home, this is the difference between furniture that decorates a room and furniture that belongs to the architecture.
Why It Could Only Be Done This Way
A piece like this — a single double-sided structure, designed to specific dimensions, in a specific combination of matt lacquers, finished to be seen from every angle and lit from within — is not something you buy off a shelf. It is something you design and import.
This is where Tredi Interiors works differently from almost everyone else in the market. We are a direct factory importer, in genuine partnership with San Giacomo, which means we can design a Lampo composition to the exact requirements of a project and have it built and delivered to spec from Italy — the precise modules, the precise lacquer combination, the integrated lighting, the frameless mitered construction, all as the manufacturer intended. There are no distributor layers in between to simplify the specification, substitute the finishes, or inflate the price. For an architect-led project in San Francisco, where the whole point is that every element is considered and correct, that direct line to the source is not a convenience. It is the only way the piece gets made the way it was drawn.
The result is a custom-level outcome at a price that reflects the furniture itself, rather than the chain of hands it would otherwise pass through.
The Result
What stands in this San Francisco home is, on paper, a bookshelf. In practice it is the device that makes an open-plan floor work. It separates the stairway from the living room without building a wall. It turns the daily climb up the stairs into an atmospheric, light-filtered sequence. It gives the living room warmth, storage, and display while keeping every bit of its light and openness. And after dark it becomes the glowing center of the home.
It is the wall that isn’t a wall — and it is exactly the kind of intelligent, beautiful, deeply functional Italian design we are proud to bring directly to the Bay Area.
Planning a new build or renovation in San Francisco, Marin, or the Peninsula, and looking for living and storage systems that do real architectural work? Visit Tredi Interiors to explore San Giacomo’s Lampo collection and discover what direct Italian importation makes possible.