Oksana Penaguião — Founder
Oksana studied architecture in Saint-Petersburg — but the questions she was asking outgrew the answers she was finding. She moved to London looking for a different way to think about design, and found it at the University of the Arts London (UAL), where she completed a Spatial Design degree in 2014. Along the way, she explored fashion design — and found the same questions she'd been asking all along. The methods were the same. Space and body, it turned out, speak the same language. She returned to architecture carrying both.
Her early career took her through Studio Seilern Architects in London, Asse Architects in Moscow, and Meganom — where she led the design of Tyufeleva Roshcha urban park.
She left. Explored. Made ceramics with her hands. Travelled.
In Portugal on what was meant to be a visit, she stayed. Lisbon offered something she hadn't expected: a feeling of freedom — to design without limits, to build something entirely her own. ão studio followed.
And with it, a way of working that draws on everything that came before — the city scale of Moscow, the craft of ceramics, the body logic of fashion. Her career has moved across the full spectrum of scale — from urban parks and cultural districts to the detail of a single object. The lens doesn't change. Space at every scale carries the same question: what does it do to the person inside it?
The answer she designs towards: it provokes. An emotion, a question you ask yourself, a moment of stillness or urgency you didn't expect. Space, at its best, is not a backdrop to life — it's a participant in it. It changes you, subtly, every time you move through it.
Oksana studied architecture in Saint-Petersburg — but the questions she was asking outgrew the answers she was finding. She moved to London looking for a different way to think about design, and found it at the University of the Arts London (UAL), where she completed a Spatial Design degree in 2014. Along the way, she explored fashion design — and found the same questions she'd been asking all along. The methods were the same. Space and body, it turned out, speak the same language. She returned to architecture carrying both.
Her early career took her through Studio Seilern Architects in London, Asse Architects in Moscow, and Meganom — where she led the design of Tyufeleva Roshcha urban park.
She left. Explored. Made ceramics with her hands. Travelled.
In Portugal on what was meant to be a visit, she stayed. Lisbon offered something she hadn't expected: a feeling of freedom — to design without limits, to build something entirely her own. ão studio followed.
And with it, a way of working that draws on everything that came before — the city scale of Moscow, the craft of ceramics, the body logic of fashion. Her career has moved across the full spectrum of scale — from urban parks and cultural districts to the detail of a single object. The lens doesn't change. Space at every scale carries the same question: what does it do to the person inside it?
The answer she designs towards: it provokes. An emotion, a question you ask yourself, a moment of stillness or urgency you didn't expect. Space, at its best, is not a backdrop to life — it's a participant in it. It changes you, subtly, every time you move through it.