Primo Orpilla is the co‐founder and principal, of Studio O+A, an interiors firm in San Francisco that specializes in workplace design. Establishing the company with Verda Alexander in Silicon Valley in 1991, Primo drew on an early interest in engineering and a feel for the growing tech economy to orient O+A to a rapidly changing work environment. Moving to San Francisco a few years later, O+A quickly gained a reputation for being a design firm as innovative as its clients—Facebook, Microsoft, Yelp, Cisco, Uber and many others.

Now in its 27th year, O+A has been recognized for over two decades with international press coverage and multiple design awards. Primo and Verda were named Designers of the Year in 2011 by Contract magazine. In 2016 O+A won the Cooper Hewitt Design Award for Interior Design. Last year FRAME Publishers released “Twelve True Tales of Workplace Design,” a comprehensive retrospective of O+A’s work.

A frequent lecturer on design and the future of workplace, Primo speaks at schools and design conferences globally. The course in workplace design he teaches at IE University in Madrid seeks to pass on to a new generation of designers the philosophy of immersion in a client’s culture that has been a driving force behind every O+A project. Primo has taught interior design to undergraduates at San Jose State University and to graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin. As Global Chair of Student Experience at IIDA, he works to promote design education and expand opportunities for young people in the profession.

In recent years Primo has taken up a new passion: product design. His company Orpilla, Inc. designs award-winning multi‐faceted, versatile workstations and office products for OFS, Kimball Office, Martin-Brattrud and IdeaPaint, bringing the principles of customization and adaptability that made O+A famous to the level of the individual workspace.