Vincenzo Botte on building his high-end steelwork firm, By Vincenzo

Vincenzo Botte specialises in fabricating metal-framed windows and doors that are larger and more sophisticated than their factory-made counterparts. 

But Botte – Enzo to his friends – says that’s not the only reason he counts billionaires and high-profile architects amongst his repeat clients.

“They can feel the emotion in the work,” he says.

“My clients aren’t just buying a product: they are buying a story.”

That story begins in Naples in the early 1980s, when a teenage Botte began apprenticing for a blacksmith on weekdays after school. 

His first proper job, working for a local construction company, didn’t last long.

“Within a few months, I was telling the boss what to do,” he says, impishly. 

Soon, he had established his own windows and doors business.

He spent several years refining his craft.

Then, on holiday in Australia in 1991, he eyed a gap in the market for high-end metal fabrication – or, as he terms it, “Made in Australia, the Italian way”.

Today, By Vincenzo employs around 50 staff at its Sydney workshop.

Botte notes proudly that his wife, Australian-born Patricia, and two of their three children, Giovanni and Giuliana, are part of the business.

“Our third, Federica, is like me: she doesn’t want to work for anyone but herself,” he laughs. “But my hope is still there.”

Most of the commissions the company accepts come directly from architects, who Botte says appreciate his willingness to attempt extraordinary feats.

“Architects want to work with craftspeople who respect their vision, even if that vision is very ambitious,” he says. 

Recent commercial jobs include a 28-square-metre curved sliding glass door for restaurateur Matt Moran’s Barangaroo House in Sydney and a two-panel, eight-metre by 5.5-metre guillotine window for Crown Melbourne – the largest such window in the southern hemisphere.

Residential highlights include soaring glass facades and multistorey spiral steel staircases for some of Sydney’s best-known trophy homes.

James Packer’s former residence in Vaucluse, La Mer – which sold to Chinese billionaire Chau Chak Wing for $70 million in 2017 – and John Symond’s Point Piper mega-mansion, Wingadal – with a price tag tipped to exceed $200 million – both boast By Vincenzo metalwork.

Botte is understandably discreet when discussing his work for Australia’s most affluent individuals.

But, he says, “Our wealthiest clients are often very enthusiastic.”

He recalls one home owner who drove behind the By Vincenzo trailer as it transported an enormous glass window from the company’s workshop in Sydney’s Inner West to Darling Point in the Eastern Suburbs.

The panel was so tall that Botte’s team needed to lift electricity lines at several points to allow the truck to pass underneath.

For the client, Botte says, “The journey was part of the story of his home.”

By Vincenzo accepts just a fraction of the work it is offered, according to Botte, often turning down large commercial jobs that its founder feels lack “heart and soul” or that pose no creative challenge.

He refers to his craft as a calling and professes never to have felt intimidated by the technical demands of his clients.

“Solutions always come,” he says. “If someone can sing, and he has it in the blood, he just opens his mouth and melody comes out.”