Carlo Bugatti's arrival at the design of exotic furniture was not linear or immediate. Following in his father's footsteps, in the sense that he inherited both a profession and a general creative vocation, although he had attended specific schools to learn artistic skills, he always remained in the spirit of the great amateurism for which European culture provided him with select models. Even when he ran a furniture company with solid and professional structures, serving an increasingly large clientele with particular tastes, Carlo maintained the character of his production as refined unique pieces or small series with variations, and kept the flavor of free and imaginative experimentation, both in terms of materials (with the often-emphasized use of painted parchment, chiselled copper studs, mother-of-pearl and precious metal inlays, and so on), and in terms of stylistic invention, where Moorish styles and imaginative Japanese influences follow or mix with a strong propensity for Orientalism (the dream of distant lands, the East of travelers, thus bearing witness to romantic wanderings in search of liberation from oneself and one's own civilization, and to positivist and neo-Enlightenment exploration).