Starting an artisan’s atelier: the Blitzen story

Who’s Cameo, our dog-turtle

An amusement park, a turtle and a garden. Blizen was born this way.

We were making some attractions for Gardaland, the most important theme park of Italy.

On spring evenings, once back home, we spent some hours in our garden. There are a lot of giant trees full of birds there and Chiara had the idea to make some wooden nests. Our first wooden nests!

Ok but… what does a turtle have to do with it?

Well, we have fourteen turtles, but they are all aware of being turtles, except for Cameo. Cameo, one of our turtles, has identity crises and is deeply convinced of being a dog.

Cameo follows us toddling off when we walk in the garden. He can’t bark and does not bring the newspaper, but at that time he insisted on sleeping in the dog-house of Goliath, our Shihi Tzu who nowadays is in the paradise of dogs.

A Shihi Tzu does not like to share his dog-house with a turtle, even if he believes to be a dog.

We tried and tried again to make Cameo understand the sad truth. At the end, we built a small wooden house, like Goliath’s, but smaller and bottomless. The turtles, in fact, love to stay in the shade in direct contact with the ground.

The house was nice, and many friends used to say: “What a beauty. Do you sell them too? “. After a few months, the first Blitzen houses appeared on the main e-commerce sites.

Blitzen was born, because of a turtle! It was in 2008.

Theme Parks: our work and inspiration

And then? And then we made more and more products. Everything started from our garden: we have dogs, cats, birds, owls, bees, turtles, hedgehogs and bats.

For all these beautiful animals we have built houses and nests, except for the owls. We absolutely needed to apologize with the owls, excluded from Blitzen products, so we have put one in our logo.

Sorry, owls! We hope a logo will be enough.

At the time of writing, Blitzen is exactly ten years old. Wow, ten years! In these period of time we have continued to do our work as set designers.

My masters Andrea and Chiara Blitzen have created wonders in the theaters and amusement parks of Europe with my brother Nicola. What about me? I spent seven long years in France and the Middle East to design attractions.

Meanwhile, our passion for the Blitzen houses grew.

In fact, after the turtle-houses, we started making products for cats. We designed a lot of cat-houses and scratches, inspired by our travels and our attractions.

In the following years, we got interested in bats. In our garden there were a lot of mosquitoes and when we discovered that the bats eat around two thousand in one night, we designed our first Bat Boxes. And they work!

Are you like us?

This is our passion and our world! It is a world full of poetry, charm and beautiful things and that’s why, now that I’m back on my hills in Italy, I decided to tell you about our art and our experiences.

We realize 100% by ourselves, from design drawings to cutting wood: it’s me, my brother Nicola together with Andrea and Chiara, my masters and friends.

And now? Now there are so many incredible stories that I want to share with people like us.

Are you like us?

You’re like us if you recognize yourself in two of the following sentences, at least:

• -You have at least a dog, a cat, a hedgehog, a bat, a bee, an owl or a turtle;
• You have a turtle with an identity crisis;
• You like wood, its fibers, its color, its charm, its scent;
• You like the mix between art and crafts;
• You like stories, mysteries and suggestions about wood, lands and animals;
• You like the strange and colorful world of fairy tales.

If you’re like us, I have a lot of things to tell you.

I will show you in depth Andrea’s crazy art, Chiara’s pictorial marvel, the craftsmanship of my brother Nicola and some of my drawings.

I’ll show you our projects, our hands, our world.

And then? Then I have an idea. I like drawing and I like writing, all right.

But what I love most is listening to stories and telling stories.

Cats and their mysteries fascinate me.

I would like to tell you a lot of stories with my voice and as I am bilingual, I will tell you cat stories in French and Italian (and maybe in English too). In short, I want to make a podcast about cats: a Podcat, of course. What do you think about that?

An amusement park, a turtle and a garden. Blizen was born this way.

See you next week.

alberto blitzen
ARCHITECT

I am an architect and I study the habitat of many animals. I used to live among the woods of France, the sands of the Middle East, the canals of Venice and the lights of Paris, before returning to the fold.

The fold is on the beautiful hills of Lake Garda, surrounded by castles, fairy tales and cypresses. From here I tell stories and make drawings on cats, dogs, mysteries, legends, hedgehogs and bats.