IGV Group Brand Guidelines: Giuseppe Volpe’s 1966 Milan Lift Firm and the DomusLift

A three-person office in east Milan.

IGV was founded in Milan in 1966 by the engineer Giuseppe Volpe, according to the company history published on its domuslift.com website. That history says Volpe graduated in engineering from the Politecnico di Napoli, moved to Milan at the start of 1958 and came to lifts through his first job there, before deciding to set up on his own.

The first office, the company says, measured about a hundred square metres on Via Zanella, on the eastern edge of Milan, with a staff of three: a draughtsman, a worker and a secretary. IGV first made push-button panels, then electrical gear for automatic doors, then the other components needed for a complete lift; eventually it built whole lifts and sold them to installers, more than a thousand in Italy alone, before moving to larger premises near Lambrate.

The company history says that by making part of the components itself and buying in only 30 per cent of the finished product, IGV grew quickly. In 1972 it bought land for a plant at Segrate and started a trade magazine, Elevatori. In 1981 it moved again, to a site of about twenty thousand square metres at Vignate, in the Milan hinterland, with a tower for testing lifts.

The company says that it obtained certification of its quality system in 1993, and it lists the City of Milan’s Ambrogino d’Oro civic award, presented to Giuseppe Volpe on 7 December 2007, among its milestones. The lift maker is unrelated to IGV, a maker of coffee-bean dispensers whose website is igv.it.

DomusLift and the designer cabin.

The product that defines IGV is DomusLift. The company history says its research office, then eight people, developed DomusLift in 1998 as a personal lift. In 2003 it added the SuperDomus, a lift for shafts with a reduced pit and headroom, and in the spring of 2009, it says, it marked the sale of the 15,000th DomusLift.

DomusLift is presented as a small lift for private homes, apartment blocks, outdoor settings and public buildings. The range on domuslift.com includes the standard DomusLift, a version with automatic doors and the compact XS, which the company calls the smallest DomusLift it has made. Special editions dress the cabin: the Liberty, with a mosaic in the Italian Art Nouveau style; the Crystal Clear; the Leather; and the Art – Limited Edition, unveiled at the company’s fiftieth-anniversary event at Vignate on 25 June 2016, with cabins decorated with works by Hayez, Michelangelo and Botticelli.

Around 2020 IGV Group turned towards architects and interior designers. In January 2021 Italian Luxury Magazine reported on the Ad Hoc line, a generation of highly customisable lifts interpreted by architects, with Giulio Cappellini as art director. Its second model, Pop Up, by the Milan studio CaberlonCaroppi, came in three themes — Belle Epoque, Golden Age and Home Sweet Home — using wallpaper, mirrors and boiserie, and in one case a parquet floor and a small sofa.

In April 2021 Interni described Sky Lift, a cabin by MaMa Design for IGV Group, made in Corian with soft, rounded forms and lighting that shifts from cool tones in the morning to warm, amber tones in the evening. In October 2021 the same magazine reported a project with students of the Master in Contemporary Interior Design at Istituto Marangoni Milano, under the art direction of Carlo Colombo and Giulio Cappellini, in which the students designed lifts for an assigned residential scheme. Both 2021 articles named Michele Suria as IGV Group’s chief executive.

How lift makers present themselves.

Home-lift and stairlift makers sell machines that end up in private hallways and living rooms, and two Swedish makers, Aritco and Cibes, present them that way. Aritco names its range around the home, with the HomeLift, HomeLift Compact and HomeLift Access, and credits the Swedish designer Alexander Lervik for several models; Cibes Lift Group says its customers choose from colour, material and function options picked by local design teams.

Naming often begins as engineering shorthand. Cibes still uses letter-and-number models such as the A5000, launched in 1992, and groups its lifts as A-lifts, with their own shaft walls, and B-lifts, which the company traces to a screw-and-nut design of the early 1970s. Aritco moved from numbered models, from the Aritco 7000 of 1995 to the Aritco 9000 cabin lift of 2013, to the named HomeLift and PublicLift lines from 2016 onwards.

Both companies describe selling largely through partners. Cibes Lift Group says it works through more than 270 certified distributors as well as its own offices in 20 countries; Aritco says it sells in 60 countries through more than 170 distributors, and that it set up a global network of installation and service partners in 2014. Cibes has also bought local lift companies and kept several of their names, such as Kalea, Aesy Liften and Apex Lifts.

Corporate pages fill in the rest: who owns the company and where the lifts are made. Cibes names its factories in Gävle, Jiaxing and the United States and a components unit in Gdańsk, and its owner, the investment company Nalka, lists it as a holding. Aritco describes its factory in Veddesta, outside Stockholm, and its place in Innovalift, a business area of Investment AB Latour. This guide sets out what can be checked for each brand, and marks what rests on the company’s own word.

A factory at Vignate.

The company describes the Vignate factory as the heart of the business: about 22,000 square metres of covered space, with departments for DomusLift doors, for pistons and hydraulic units, and for sheet-metal work, along with laser-cutting machines, automated bending and automated vertical warehouses. It says the founder chose to keep production at Vignate rather than move it abroad, that it exports more than 70 per cent of its output, and that it is present in more than 70 countries. A US website, domuslift.us, is linked from the Italian site.

The founding family stayed close to the business for decades. The company history says Matteo Volpe, the founder’s son, became general manager in 2013 after a long apprenticeship inside the firm, and in July 2013 the company held an open day to show new production lines at Vignate. At the fiftieth-anniversary celebration in June 2016, the company reported, Giuseppe Volpe spoke as founder alongside his son, and the firm described itself as having about 200 employees. The company says more than 600 people, among them lift-trade professionals from abroad, attended the event, which also served to unveil the Art edition of DomusLift.

The legal notice on domuslift.com, as read in November 2026, names Open Technology Experts Srl of Vignate, a company controlled by Advanced Global Solution SpA, as the business behind the site; the most recent items in the site’s news section date from October 2019. The DomusLift name, the Vignate address and the product range remain on the site.

For a design guide, IGV Group shows how a lift-component maker can build a brand around one product name and then hand its cabins to architects and designers. Compare Aritco and Cibes Lift, two other home-lift makers in this series. For this guide we use an ink blue, travertine and a muted gold with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep IGV Group’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.