Carrara-born Paolo Ulian starts every project with a pile of off-cuts—marble trimmings from local quarries, scrap metal, leftover ceramic slip—and a notebook full of half-formed ideas. What survives is whatever the material and the idea can express together once all ornament is stripped away. That approach, refined alongside his brother Giuseppe, owes as much to fine-art training at the Carrara Academy as to the industrial-design degree he later earned at ISIA Florence. After an early stint assisting Enzo Mari, Ulian set out on his own. His objects for Droog, Danese, Fontana Arte, and Antonio Lupi feel inevitable rather than styled: a washbasin carved from one marble block so nothing is wasted; a lamp cut from a single sheet of steel, folded and slotted without screws. Museums have taken note—pieces sit in the collections of the Triennale Design Museum, London’s Design Museum, and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Ulian balances studio work with teaching and exhibition design, most recently curating the 2020 Enzo Mari retrospective at Milan’s Triennale. In every role he asks the same question: how little is enough to let an idea stand?