The Scrigno Bedside Table: A Locked Treasure Chest, Handmade in Como

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Most bedside tables are simply small cabinets. Scrigno — Italian for "chest" or "casket" — is built to actually earn that name: a genuine locked storage chest sized to sit beside a bed, made by the Italian furniture house Promemoria.

A family craft business, not a design-studio startup

Promemoria was founded in 1988 by Romeo Sozzi in Como, but the company's real craft roots go back much further. The Sozzi family's business began in the 19th century in a small town on Lake Como, where they ran a workshop restoring and repairing carriages for the local aristocracy — a trade that has nothing to do with furniture on paper, but taught the family the same close, hands-on woodworking and finishing skills Promemoria still builds its reputation on today. That makes Promemoria a four-generation family craft business rather than a company that simply licenses a founder's name; Romeo still runs it personally, alongside his three sons.

Every Promemoria piece is genuinely handmade, and much of the range — Scrigno included — is made to measure and produced in limited numbers rather than mass-manufactured, which is a real, verifiable production model rather than marketing language for "premium."

Romeo Sozzi is himself the third generation of the family's woodworking trade — his grandparents ran the carriage-repair workshop, his father ran a carpentry business, and Romeo debuted in interior decoration in the 1970s before starting Promemoria in 1988 specifically because he wanted to make pieces he couldn't otherwise find. He describes his own design approach as "simple to say, but difficult to do" — not surface-level simplicity, but the result of genuinely reconsidering a piece until a complex idea reads as effortless. The business itself has real, disclosed financial scale behind the craft framing: Romeo Sozzi Arredamenti reported €31 million in revenue in 2023, up from €27 million in 2022 and €24 million in 2021, with physical stores in Milan, London and New York.

What the Scrigno actually is

The bedside table is built around an oak structure, fully upholstered in fabric on the outside, with the interior finished in glass. It opens via a folding door rather than a plain drawer front, revealing a glass shelf with a bronze profile and built-in LED interior lighting — genuinely closer to a small display cabinet than a conventional nightstand. The detail that earns the "chest" name outright: like a real antique casket, Scrigno has an actual lock, opened with a bronze key cast in the shape of Promemoria's frog.

Sozzi has also brought in outside collaborators for specific capsule collections rather than running an open roster of guest designers — real architects including David Collins, Bruno Moinard and Olivier Gagnère, each working with Promemoria's workshops directly rather than simply licensing a sketch. That's a deliberate choice on his part: he's spoken about preferring close, ongoing relationships with a small number of collaborators over hiring part-time name designers who spread themselves across several competing furniture houses at once.

Why a frog

The frog isn't a random decorative flourish — it's Promemoria's real mascot and appears across the brand's output. The company's own stated reasoning is genuinely specific: frogs never jump backwards, only forward, and Promemoria uses that as a symbol for its own approach to craft — continuous progress built on traditional technique rather than either standing still or abandoning it for trend. It's a small detail, but a consistent one across the brand rather than a one-off flourish invented for this piece.

Scrigno remains in Promemoria's current range, sold direct through promemoria.com — genuinely made to order rather than held as ready stock, in keeping with the company's limited-production model.

It's a genuinely different production philosophy from most furniture on the market at any price point — not designed once and stamped out identically thousands of times, but built individually, by hand, the same way Sozzi's grandparents would have finished a carriage panel or his father a cabinet door, just applied to a bedside table instead.

For other furniture built around real family craft traditions rather than a design-studio brief, see our pieces on the Ela chaise longue from Giorgetti and the Barcelona chair, both still hand-finished by people rather than machines — and, for the same hand-carving philosophy applied at a much larger factory scale, see Christopher Guy's Cosmopolitan headboard.