David Allan Pesso has always been a guy on the go. “My parents were a bit nomadic,” he says, “and by the time I was 18, I had attended 14 different schools.”

David Allan Pesso has always been a guy on the go. “My parents were a bit nomadic,” he says, “and by the time I was 18, I had attended 14 different schools.”

He’s also a person who believes in taking away something positive from every experience. For example, “All that moving around when I was young taught me how to read people and form relationships,” he says, “and that has proven to be instrumental throughout my life.”

No matter where he finds himself these days, whether meeting with a client in Italy, or turning up the soil in his back yard, Pesso says he always tries hard to “be in the moment. I’ve learned the importance of being fully aware of what you’re doing at any given time and place, and being where you are when you’re there.”

Likewise, he says he finds inspiration for his creativity in the everyday, simple things—be it the architecture of a building or a person seated next to him on a plane. “I’m fortunate in that I have a job I can take with me wherever I go,” he says. “We don’t really have a distinct division between work, play, family, and profession. It’s all interconnected, and I believe that’s a real asset to both me and to my clients.”

Pesso combined his studio and home when he and his family moved to South Florida a few years ago, a situation that is working well for him until he finds a suitable commercial space. “I have two kids and two dogs all under the age of nine, so I’m pretty immersed in their world right now,” he laughs.

Not that his work doesn’t keep him busy. Since he started his career, Pesso has licensed more than 130 original furniture designs in the U.S. and Europe and currently holds five U.S. design patents, three for a library casegoods system and two for seating.

“I’ve learned the importance of being fully aware of what you’re doing at any given time and place, and being where you are when you’re there.”

- David Allan Pesso

Regardless of what he's designing, Pesso says he's “constantly striving for a clean, reduced geometry without extraneous details. I focus on economies of scale, and my goal is to attain more with less. I think Herman Miller's Celeste lounge seating is a good visual example of what I mean.”

Pesso finds great satisfaction in his work and can't imagine doing anything else. “I've been fortunate to have produced a fairly large amount of work in a relatively short time frame,” he says. “And I still get the same thrill today when I see one of my pieces out in public as I did the first time it happened.”