Giancarlo De Astis

The son of diplomats, Giancarlo de Astis grew up in Mexico, United States, Italy, Venezuela, Tunisia and Australia. As a result of his travels he is fluent in English, Spanish, Italian and French.  As a teenager, he attended schools in Florence and Rome, receiving a liberal arts education and exposure to the best of Western art, culture and architectural history. He graduated Cum Laude from Tufts University in Boston with a degree in International Relations aspiring to become a Diplomat.

Disappointed by the political climate of the early 1980s, De Astis’ career direction changed after graduating from college; he returned to his birthplace, Mexico City, where he began exploring the field of media marketing and sales. He entered the entertainment industry, working first in Miami for Grupo Televisa, the largest Latin American media conglomerate, then in New York City and later Los Angeles, where he became an entertainment marketing executive at several U.S. companies specializing in Hispanic and Asian markets. His clients included major Hollywood Studios, theme parks, packaged goods and automotive advertisers. Between the early 1990s and 2001 he ambitiously founded two entertainment companies as an independent consultant. 

In late 2001, changes in his personal and professional life led De Astis to leave behind the Hollywood executive lifestyle to pursue a vision of designing and building hand crafted furniture using parts from old airplanes. He dropped everything, bought a VW van and traveled throughout the Southwest, West and Northwest regions of the United States, making a seminal stop in Tucson, Arizona to visit the famous airplane junkyards. He purchased a few airplane parts and began creating the furniture prototypes derived from drawings inspired in 1995 during an airplane flight over the Mojave Desert, when he first witnessed the awe-inspiring airplane “bone yards.”

In January of 2002 he established a temporary workshop where he could learn and perfect his design ideas and craft—building and learning how to relate with the aluminum and alloy pieces. After spending over a year refining his skills, he moved into a beautiful old brick building in the Culver City area of Los Angeles, which he renovated and subsequently opened as a studio and showroom in late spring 2003. Unexpectedly, this space was an airplane components factory during World War II.

In 2007, De Astis relocated with his wife and two young daughters to Salt Lake City, UT where he now crafts from a modest workshop near downtown.

As an artist and furniture designer, De Astis pays respect to the numerous man-hours spent by others in creating those fantastic pieces of metal, creatively transforming each part into a new work of art. In the studio, he harmonizes the component with other materials—glass, wood, stone, leather—which result in impressive, highly crafted pieces of functional furniture, including chairs, desks, lamps, tables, and other pieces for the home, office and public spaces.

In 2007, De Astis’, Il Sole table was accepted for accession by the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air & Space Museum in Washington D.C.