Every Consideration with Donna Lennard

In this installment of Every Consideration, Alex sits down with Donna Lennard, owner and founder of il Buco Family, at the il Buco Vita store in Manhattan’s East Village to explore the deeper layers of what it means to create a business rooted in craft and hospitality.

We’ve long admired the way Donna cultivates spaces that feel like home—where every detail, from the food to the ambiance, tells a story. In the last few years, we have added some of il Buco Vita’s pieces into our own line of homewares—objects that, like ours, blend beauty with function and quality and carry the imprint of the maker, celebrating the slight variations that give handmade objects their humanity.

Her path—nontraditional, passionate, and driven by instinct—resonates with Alex’s own experience building a brand from the ground up. In this conversation, they delve into what it takes to start something meaningful, how to foster a genuinely welcoming environment and why the heart of any good business lies in how it makes people feel.

“It’s really not about the fast rise. To me, I’m a slow rise person—like the bread that’s left to rise or the thing that you create organically little by little. The thing that gets the star review right away doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s got all the ingredients, that it’s easy to run.” - Donna Lennard