Origins on site

Origins on site

Thirty-six years. Twenty-six of them on a building site.

Not a metaphor, nor a way to make a biography sound denser than it is. It is simply what I remember: summers as a child with my father Carlo, bags of mortar hauled on my shoulder, the sound of an angle grinder cutting rebar. I was ten, maybe eleven. My brother Federico, two years younger, was there too; they would put us in a safe corner to help as labourers, trowel in hand or passing tools to the workers. The classic work that makes you feel useful even when you are not yet old enough to really be so.

I felt grown up, though. That is the right word. Not important in any ego-driven sense; grown up in the sense of being involved in something that had substance, that left physical traces in the world. Walls rising, tiles taking their place, freshly mixed mortar, rebar cut with the grinder, the particular smell of finishing plaster as it dries. Three distinct smells, which for me were the smell of home, then as now.

From those summers I learned no manual trade in any strict sense. Carrying bags on my shoulder, perhaps, and nothing more. But what I did absorb is not in any manual and cannot be taught in any course: familiarity with the construction site as a living place, curiosity about what happens inside walls before they are closed, the awareness that every centimetre of a building is someone's decision.

There was another environment I frequented from before I fully understood what I was absorbing. My mother is an architect, who studied at the Politecnico di Milano; when I was three she would already bring me to lectures because she had nowhere to leave me. Growing up, I spent time in those spaces, the lecture halls, the studios, the way people discuss proportion and volume, the designer's perspective. It was not an academic formation; it was contamination, in the most literal sense. A child who drew floor plans instead of house doodles with clouds, as I did in primary school, making my drawings incomprehensible to my classmates.

Building site and Politecnico together, seen as a child, built something I did not yet know I was building.

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What I observed in my father that no course teaches

Some things can only be learned from the inside. My father Carlo has worked in construction since 1983: forty years on every kind of site, in every season, facing every conceivable class of technical problem. I watched him work as a child, then as a teenager, then as an adult building his own idea of a business.

One thing I observed over time was this: Carlo would override even the solutions proposed by architects. He would instead state what he believed, often without explaining why. Much as people do who have reached a level of competence so high that certain things feel obvious to them, and therefore, they assume, to whoever stands before them. From the outside, I could not understand the basis for his choice. Understanding came later, when the correctness of the choice became concrete in the facts. Only then could I piece together what had gone through my father's mind.

There is something in that kind of competence that is hard to put into words, even for the person who holds it. It is not intuition; it is a library built on decades of problems solved, patterns recognised, things that appeared to be one thing and turned out to be another. That library does not articulate itself in explanations because whoever possesses it no longer remembers what it was like not to have it. It is knowledge become reflex.

What I carried away from those years is not the manual craft, which is not mine. I took the way of looking at a construction site: attention to technical details that seem minor and are not, wariness of quick solutions when something does not add up, respect for whoever will live in that space in ten or twenty years without knowing anything of what happened inside the walls.

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Why Renewall was built on this tradition

Renewall did not come from a market analysis. Or rather, there was an analysis, but the root goes further back than any spreadsheet.

The high-end residential renovation sector in Milan had a structural problem that those working in it know well; whoever commissions the work, by contrast, often discovers it late and at their own cost. The problem is the distance between who signs the contract and who physically carries out the work. In many firms, even well-positioned ones, the manager who meets the client during the commercial phase is not the same person who supervises the site day by day. Subcontracting chains are built that lengthen response times, dilute responsibility, and make it almost impossible to know, at any given moment, who is accountable for what.

The family building tradition of 1983 that I observed for years had the opposite quality: direct physical presence, undelegated responsibility, tradespeople known and controlled. It was not an aesthetic choice; it was simply how the business worked.

When I founded Renewall, the decision to work with our own tradespeople and to maintain direct supervision on site was, for me, the obvious choice. Not because it was the only conceivable approach in the abstract; because it was the only one consistent with what I had seen work in practice. We call this approach direct execution: the firm builds, it does not coordinate from a distance. Whoever signed the contract is present where the work is done.

My father Carlo joined Renewall at the start of 2023 as Technical Site Director. That too was the obvious choice: forty years of direct experience, knowledge of materials, the site-reading ability I described above. The chain closed naturally, without planning.

Renewall's temporal anchor is not a date of corporate registration. It is that family building tradition beginning in 1983, which I observed for twenty years, and which found a precise operational form when I chose to build a company in that image.

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What "seeing where construction is heading" means

In the LinkedIn post that gave rise to this article I had written: «having watched it evolve from the Nineties to today allows me to understand where it will go». It is worth developing what I mean, because without a concrete example that phrase sounds like a vague promise.

I will start with something specific: the question of indoor air quality in residential buildings. In the Nineties, when I accompanied my father on sites, the concept of mechanical ventilation in apartments was essentially absent from the Milanese residential market. Buildings «breathed» through natural infiltration, old window frames, thermal bridges. No one spoke of mechanical ventilation as a site standard.

I watched the first generation of high-performance energy windows arrive. I watched apartments become increasingly airtight, first in high-end projects, then as standard. I watched clients begin to ask questions about relative humidity and air quality, questions they were not asking ten years ago. I watched designers include mechanical ventilation in specifications as a requirement, not an option.

Now, in the market segment we serve, residential renovations above 200 sq m in central Milan and its hinterland, mechanical ventilation is already an implicit expectation for a proportion of clients. Within five years it will be an explicit expectation for most.

This is not a consultant's analysis; it is what I see in site conversations, in the specifications of the designers we work with, in the questions that come up during surveys. Whoever enters a building firm at ten and stays for three decades, even only as an observer, accumulates a kind of knowledge that trend reports cannot produce. Not because the reports are wrong; because they always arrive after reality has already moved.

The same applies to regulation. Legislative Decree 81/08 on construction site safety is not a bureaucratic matter for someone who works on site every week: it is a system of concrete constraints that changes how work is organised, responsibilities assigned, equipment managed. I completed the RSPP (Italian Safety Officer certification under Legislative Decree 81/08) pathway in 2024 not out of formal obligation; because I wanted to understand that system from the inside, not manage it as a set of compliance boxes. The same logic applies to the ISO 9001 and ISO 45001 certifications we are pursuing: they are not labels, they are control tools for a process that already existed. Certification makes it externally verifiable.

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The client who wonders who is building their home

There is a question every client should ask before signing a renovation contract, and that rarely gets asked because they do not know it is the right question: who will physically be present on my site? Not who signed the contract. Who will enter the apartment every morning, who will take the operational decisions on the spot, who will answer if something does not add up?

The answer to that question is the difference between a firm that coordinates and a firm that executes. It is not a matter of company size, nor of the price on the estimate. It is a structural choice about how you want to stand in the market.

I chose to be on site from when I was ten, even when my presence was not strictly necessary. Now that Renewall exists, that presence is part of the contract; not as a commercial promise, as an operational norm.

Whoever commissions a renovation from me knows that I or my father Carlo will be present at the critical phases of the site. They know that the tradespeople who enter their apartment are not subcontractors chosen at the last minute; they are people we work with consistently, who know the standards we have set ourselves.

This continuity, between what I observed for decades and what we build today, is what allows me to answer with certainty when a client asks: «will you really be there?»

Yes. We will be there.