Some designers CHOOSE this profession.
LUIS LA PEGNA was born into it.
There are people who fall into a career. And then there are people like Luis La Pegna, people for whom a passion arrives so early, so completely, and with such force that the only question was never what to do with their life, but how far they could take it.
As a boy growing up in Perth, Luis could not walk past a room without imagining it differently. He rearranged. He questioned. He pushed and pulled at the spaces around him with the kind of instinct that no school teaches and no amount of experience fully explains. While other children played, Luis was studying the way light fell across a wall, debating colour choices with anyone who would listen, and feeling genuinely unsettled by a room that hadn't reached its potential. Design didn't choose him as a career. It claimed him as a calling
Through those years, Luis BUILT something rarer than a business. He built a reputation.
He opened his first studio in Perth driven by nothing more complicated than a need to be surrounded by beautiful things and to share them with others. The response was immediate. Within twelve months the studio had evolved into a fully-fledged retail destination, and what followed was eighteen years of relentless, joyful building. Two flagship stores. An importing operation that took him around the world: the Milan Salone, Maison&Objet in Paris, Highpoint Market in the United States, trade fairs across Asia. He wasn't browsing. He was hunting. For the piece that didn't exist in any showroom, the maker nobody else had found, the object that would stop a client in their tracks the moment they walked through their own front door.
Clients came to him for a single room and returned for their entire home. They referred their closest friends. They trusted him not just with their spaces but with their stories, because Luis understood, instinctively and completely, that a home is never just about furniture and finishes. It is about the life being lived inside it.
“He wasn’t BROWSING. He was hunting
…for the OBJECT that would STOP a client in their tracks.”
The deepest influence on the way Luis sees the world (and by extension, the way he sees a room) is his Italian heritage. His parents are from the south of Italy, his father's family from Naples. The Amalfi coast was a second home throughout his childhood and remains a place he returns to again and again: not for a holiday, but for a refilling. The architecture worn beautiful by centuries of sun. The way colour is used without apology. The art, the food, the sheer density of culture layered upon culture. It moves through everything he creates. The warmth, the richness, the conviction that beauty is not an indulgence but a necessity.
At home, Luis lives exactly as he designs. His walls are installations. Art collected over decades, arranged with the same obsessive eye he brings to a client's brief. Furniture sourced from across the world sits alongside cherished family heirlooms. Every object has a story. Every room has been considered and reconsidered until it feels, finally and completely, like itself.
A decade ago, he made the move to Sydney. Not out of restlessness, but out of a fierce desire to grow. Perth had given him everything he'd asked of it. He wanted a bigger canvas, bolder briefs, and a city that matched his ambition.
Sydney said yes.
Today, thirty years into a career that began with an obsession and has never once lost it, Luis leads LLP Design with the same hunger he brought to that first Perth studio. The projects are larger. The sourcing network spans continents. The documentation is meticulous, the workmanship pedantic in the best possible sense. Every detail pursued until it is exactly right, because Luis has never found a way to care about anything less than that. His clients feel it. They always do.
Whether you're creating a HOME, workplace or hospitality space, we'd love to hear ABOUT your vision.
Passionate. TRANSITIONAL. Curated
