“xcelsior is an abbreviation, inspired by minimalist architecture traditions and derived from the Latin verb Excelsior meaning development and spiral-shaped upwards movement. It is a reference to the company's employees' former enthusiasm taken in gliding and their continuous aspiration towards freedom, travelling in space and time, flying several spans above customary and routine matters, yet in heights that do not make your head spin and allow to see essential details and textures.
Freedom is the absolute core value – freedom to make decisions, to develop a concept, to refuse a project which lacks any potential or meeting of minds, freedom to focus on the whole design project and to understand its separate parts, freedom to create a truly likable environment around us, to use and to offer others products that we consider outstanding, freedom to ignore postulates of marketing and active sales and to doubt new designs of famous brands in case the designs are not good enough.
A measure for all decision-making is good and convincing design, meaning a concept-production that crowns with a good-looking, convenient, and durable product. The notion of a product here implies a broad meaning – starting from architecture and interior design to properly customised lighting of a chair or a teacup. Economic arguments have never been of essential importance, although they are automatically implied in a definition of a “good design”. No doubts that good design is cost effective in a long-term and delivers a bigger added positive emotion in a short-term.
Long-term business, long-term relations. Customers who become family members after realisation of their private house project, businessmen who come back after five years with a new project because previously received a good advice.
Time. Sometimes it runs unnoticed, sometimes there is no such at all. For someone who thinks there is no need to search for new solutions, because they are written in some book and are always the same and instant like Liepaja coffee, it may seem that time does not keep on friendly terms with design. Yet time becomes a friend of design after having put it to a test.
A design process is like a rebus, where based on personal knowledge, experience, and intuition one needs to find the best solution for a particular person in a particular space considering particular budget and time.
And we like it, we have truly been admiring creating these new solutions... for already more than 25 years.
Perhaps, xcelsior is not for everybody, yet it is for all those, who care about freedom, individuality, concept and design quality.”

arch. Artūrs Martinsons
xcelsior founder