Federica Teso, Founder & Creative Director
Federica Teso is the founder and Creative Director of Less Than 3, the Brooklyn-based restaurant and hospitality design studio.
Originally from Como, Italy, she studied advertising at IED in Milan and art direction at Central Saint Martins in London. She moved to New York in 2010, where she built her experience across branding, visual merchandising, and spatial design, working with agencies like Saatchi & Saatchi and alongside Oliviero Toscani.
In 2020, she founded Less Than 3: a studio shaped by a simple idea: keeping the relationship between designer and client close, direct, and personal.
Today, she leads every project hands-on, from restaurant interior design and brand identity to seasonal installations and experiential environments, working closely with hospitality brands and independent restaurants across New York.
The Studio team
At Less Than 3, the team is small by design.
We work with a close network of designers, fabricators, and installers: people we trust, and people we’ve worked with for years. Depending on the project, the team expands and contracts, but it always stays focused and hands-on.
Our backgrounds range from interior design and visual merchandising to painting, paper craft, and tattoo artistry. Different disciplines, one shared instinct: attention to detail, material, and atmosphere.
This is what allows us to move fluidly between restaurant interior design, seasonal installations, and experiential environments, shaping spaces that feel layered, personal, and built with intention.
No unnecessary layers. No distance between idea and execution. Just the right people, brought together for each project.