The Cutting-Edge Legacy Practice
Bespoke Legacy Curation, Narration, Preservation & Showcasing Projects, Strategic Legacy & Heritage Advisory + Legacy & Identity Ateliers For Individuals, Families & Legacy Entities Globally to Ensure the Longevity of Their Legacies
The Relevance & Significance of Legacies
Legacies are far more than a storyline, gesture of appreciation, finances, legalities, philanthropy, branding, or family charters. Your legacy is your most vital asset and competitive advantage, uniquely blending complexity and value. It’s a collection of your meaningful multilayered capitals, both tangible and intangible assets, encompassing a wealth of treasures. It anchors, fosters engagement, and inspires a sense of belonging, meaning, responsibility, cultivating stewardship, guardianship, and custodianship. However, assuming it will endure without purposeful practices is a misconception. You must actively curate, narrate, preserve, build upon, and showcase it to ensure its relevance. Neglected legacies fade, families fragment, and wealth gradually evaporates. As a cornerstone of dynastic success, your legacy holds the power to make or brake generations. We empower you to thrive via your legacy for generations to come.
Benefit from our bespoke legacy research (including historical), curation, narration, preservation, and showcasing projects, as well as strategic legacy advisory, immersive legacy ateliers, and identity projects. Your entire experience is purposefully curated to align with your goals. We work globally with deep cultural understanding, uniquely qualified to deliver exceptional value at any stage of your legacy journey. Narrate, preserve, and build upon your legacy, ensure its current relevance, engage and inspire everyone, maximise and showcase its significance, and pass it on to the next generation when the time feels right. Expect robust frameworks, profound narratives, exquisite writing, and evocative illustrations in formats, style, and tone fitting your scope and wishes.
Driving a New Legacy Paradigm
Until The Legacy Atelier™
Our Founder brought and has been championing a much-deserved paradigm shift around legacies, as current references, scopes, extent of elaboration, and practices are restrictive, outdated, and filled with incongruent statements. Focusing only on some business aspects, philanthropy, finances, legalities, family governance, and historical insights, simple stories, with a brief chronological timeline do not ensure the longevity of legacies. Such services also miss invaluable opportunities of guidance on how to best preserve, narrate, represent, harness, showcase, and maximise legacies, as well as how to bring anchoring, engagement, and inspiration via legacies to current and future legacy-builders, guardians, stewards, and custodians. Consequently, there is no solid relevance to legacies, resulting in these sitting on shelves, at best, even if on digital ones. Zita knows that legacies are a top priority for individuals, families, and entities globally. Hence, after immense research, development, and very many years of working with them, she set up The Legacy Atelier™.
We offer an extended, layered, and purposeful view of legacies, with fitting, cutting-edge practices driven by a profound cultural understanding and a participatory design. Benefit from our bespoke legacy research, curation, narration, preservation, and showcasing projects, strategic legacy advisory, and immersive legacy ateliers globally. Gain immense value from our multidisciplinary methodology, unique savoir-faire, and legacy trajectory, exceptional prowess in legacies, topical expertise in family businesses, family offices, and family foundations, as well as legacy entities and direct family cases. Explore, articulate, harness, build upon, maximise, and celebrate your legacy. We deliver upon a much-deserved, extended view and representation of your legacy. Elevate your legacy in meaningful and purposeful ways on a myriad of levels. Expect meticulous research, profound narratives, exquisite writing, and culturally-fitting evocative illustrations bringing your legacy to life and inspiring everyone for generations to come.
Explore Our Unique Approach
Endorsement & References
“Zita is delightful to work with and she holds a remarkable prowess in all things family legacies. She is culturally astute, and her writing as well as design skills are top-notch, fitting our detail-oriented expectations perfectly. I highly recommend Zita for any high-end legacy curation and showcasing needs for business families and their family offices as well as family foundations globally and look forward to continuing to work with her.”
Dr. Corinna Basler, Director, Maybach Foundation, USA
"Keeping wealth for centuries is a very, very difficult task, given the ever-changing and mostly hostile environment. The only enduring success-factors are the continuity of character, philosophy, values, trust within, as well as how well we understand and build upon our family foundations. Hence long-term legacy and succession planning(the preparation of future generations) is tantamount to survival. From our 12-year-long acquaintance we know that Zita is exactly advocating the tools necessary for these critical family activities."
Baron Rainer von Echlin, PhD, Family Principal, Switzerland
“Zita was working on producing a video about 40 years of our industry family business. She did a great job researching and coming up with a profound legacy narration and curation. She has many ideas for preserving family history and keeping legacy for generations to come.”
May Naamani Makhzoumi, President, Makhzoumi Foundation, Dubai, UAE
“Zita is extremely thoughtful and dedicated. Such a refreshing and effective approach, even with the most complex legacy.“
Private Family Principal, USA
“Zita’s unique methodology is deeply impressive, beautiful imagery and wording too, all remarkably fitting and uplifting!”
Private Family Principal, UK
“These are the legacy projects that we needed to enhance our family identity, preserve, narrate, and showcase our family legacy, and plan for the future together, based on our unique foundations.”
Private Family Principal, ME
Meet Your Legacy Aesthete & A Few Team Members
For Each Bespoke Project, Our Founder Creates the Ultimate Team, Bringing in Top Trusted Professionals,
Including Award-Winning Editors, as well as Specific Insights from Major Cultural Institutions to Ensure Your Desired Outcome.
Zita Nikoletta Verbényi is the Founder and Legacy Aesthete at The Legacy Atelier™. She is a Top Recommended Family Business Adviser in 2021/22/23 by Spear’s 500 with her bespoke legacy curatorial projects driven by a deep cultural understanding and an exceptional prowess in legacies. Zita is a multilingual family business and family office topical expert and senior international content professional, holding a wealth of expertise and profound insights into the most critical dynamics and matters facing individuals and families of wealth. She works on bespoke legacy research, curation, narration, preservation, and showcasing projects, also offering strategic legacy advisory and immersive legacy and identity ateliers for current and future legacy builders, guardians, stewards, and custodians to achieve their goals. Zita developed a multidisciplinary methodology and framework, and a family legacy trajectory helping families as a guiding and benchmarking tool to ensure the longevity of their legacies. She is a cultural scientist and the 1st PhD Candidate in Family Legacies with a novel research dedicated to extending upon the current domain of legacies. Zita holds an MA in Philology (Diploma in Comparative Aesthetics in ITA) and a Programme in Cultural Management (museums, archives, and libraries) at ELTE University. She is a Member at the Museums Association and her projects feature meticulous research, exquisite writing, profound narratives, and evocative designs with a touch of luxury.
Dante De Lucia is the Founder & CEO at Competitive Legacy and a family principal of their family business. He is an Independent Corporate Director and Advisor who works with Family Business owners, their Board, and its C-Suite team to strengthen their family and corporate governance structures, internationalise operations and implement strategic action plans for harmonious intergenerational transitions. Certified by the Institute of Directors of England (IoD), Dante holds an MBA from Alfred University, and has 22+ years’ experience in Strategic Management Consulting for Families in Business. Dante has worked with a varied type of enterprises such as multigenerational family businesses, family offices, their trusted consultants, entrepreneurs, as well as business associations, and educational institutions. Dante motivates comprehensive conversations around strategic scenarios that aim to facilitate agreed steps towards profitable and sustainable strategies based on the shareholder’s expectations, family projection and competitive landscape. Dante is based in Miami and collaborates with Zita on specific projects.
Orsolya Hulley is a Librarian, Editor, Bookseller and Translator. Amongst her clients are well-known family publishing houses and bookseller companies, including Springer Nature, whose showroom she managed for many years, and Harrassowitz, a leading supplier of scholarly monographs, subscriptions, research materials and literary texts, as well as the Goethe Institut.
Orsolya works in German and English and is involved in museum projects, overseeing and managing museum competitions and beyond. Orsolya is also an award-winning author and translated numerous literary works, and may work with us on specific projects.
Andrea Forrai is a Philologist and Interpreter, having worked with heads of state, ruling families, embassies, blue-chip companies and UHNWIs for the last 25+ years, reflecting her dedication to excellence, cultural sensitivity and profound understanding of the delicate nature of high-stakes communication. She is also a seasoned luxury travel professional adept at thriving in demanding environments across the globe.
Andrea holds a BA in Philology from ELTE University with a diploma in Germanic Studies, specialised in Netherlandistic Studies. She also spent a semester at Utrecht University and another at the University of Groningen. She works in English, Dutch and German, and may collaborate with us on specific projects.
Pillars & Values
Trust • Confidentiality • High Ethics • Privacy • Thoughtfulness • Diversity • Inclusion • Responsibility
Culture • Knowledge • Guardianship • Stewardship • Custodianship
Mission & Vision for the Longevity of Legacies
The world’s most innovative and influential families have been thriving for generations by focusing on their family legacies as their most critical competitive advantage and most important asset to ensure the longevity of their complex family, business, investment, and other activities making up their ever-moving galaxies. We empower individuals, families, and legacy entities to thrive for generations to come by embracing, shaping, representing, and benefiting from their legacies, as well as passing these on to their next generation of legacy guardians, stewards, and custodians. We are committed to highlighting that legacies are highly complex, precious, undervalued, and underestimated, whilst advocating for and championing novel practices helping you enhance and maximise your legacy, and turning it to a shared, joyful preoccupation and a powerful tool for anchoring and inspiration.
We envision and create a world in which a legacy no longer means and represents a hindrance, but immense value, the most important asset that anyone may have. For the last 4.5 years we have been sparking effective considerations and actions around legacies, prompting legacy builders, guardians, stewards, as well as custodians to lead with their legacies benefiting family members, shareholders, other stakeholders communities, and societies globally.
Exploring the World of Narratives
Our Founder has been passionately exploring the world of narrative constellations since the age of 10, when her country of origin went through a whole narrative re-set with streets being renamed and books rewritten. From the age of 13 came her intercultural and cross-cultural immersions whilst spending summer weeks around Europe in international schools learning a multitude of languages. These experiences were followed by living in various countries and explorations in Cultural Anthropology, Comparative Literature, Linguistics, History of Arts, Hermeneutics, Comparative Aesthetics, further fields of Aesthetics and Philosophy during her university years, including PhD studies.
Family Legacies as Masterpieces
Zita believes that multigenerational family legacies are masterpieces. She possesses a unique ability, and a trained comparatist brain, to map, analyse, synthesise, preserve, purposefully curate, and showcase the most critical and complex facets, threads, and overarching narratives of multigenerational family legacies through their different family eras; familyisms, as well as help these to be passed on to the next generation of legacy guardians, stewards, and custodians.