Head to Tuscany for a design double bill that treats the object as material research

LABottega has stood on Viale Apua in the Tuscan town of Pietrasanta since 1920, when art director and curator Serena del Soldato’s great-grandparents opened it as a shop on a bare stretch of the Versilia coast, adding a trattoria under the plane trees and an inn for travellers. The family remade the place in 2011, and it now runs as a restaurant, rooms and a gallery. Del Soldato owns and directs it, and has curated its exhibitions ever since.

Above the town, at Strettoia, del Soldato also runs an organic farm, called La Stellata. It’s home to geese, peacocks and goats, a kitchen garden, and some 300 quercetano olive trees, a variety safeguarded by a Slow Food presidium, across a hectare of hillside. Designers and artists are invited to the farm each year to make work inspired by the location; the pieces are built with artisans in Pietrasanta, and what they make stays, first shown in the gallery and then used to furnish the guest rooms.

Federica Elmo’s ‘Naturamagica’, from 2022, for example, saw the designer work dried acanthus branches into a bedside table, and build another table inspired by the lemons from the grove, with raw terracotta set against powder-coated metal. Her table is still in LABottega’s shared kitchen.

Outsiders residency at La Stellata in Tuscany, by Tableau and LABottega

Outsiders is the location’s latest initiative, conceived with Tableau, the Copenhagen studio and gallery founded by Julius Værnes Iversen in 2018; a floral designer by training, his practice runs from flowers to spatial design, objects and curation.

‘Outsiders grew from a shared belief that the most meaningful creative work happens when it’s rooted in a place rather than simply presented in one. Tableau brings the curatorial framework and invites artists into a dialogue with Pietrasanta’s extraordinary material culture, while Serena [del Soldato] opens the doors to a community that can’t be replicated,’ Iversen says. ‘It’s a project built on trust – fittingly, I was the very first guest at LABottega, long before we imagined creating something like this together.’

‘For me, Outsiders is about making people feel that they belong here,’ says del Soldato. ‘Pietrasanta has an incredible network of artisans, growers, neighbours and makers, and my role is to connect artists with that living community. Julius brings a fresh curatorial perspective from Copenhagen; I bring the local relationships and everyday knowledge of this place. Together we’ve created a residency where hospitality becomes part of the creative process.’

Creatives taking part in the residency work with local waste material. The first of resident, Willem van Hooff, showed an exhibition titled ‘I’m Alone With My Thoughts’ at LABottega throughout July 2026. It featured handmade ceramic vessels, each cut with a line of his own handwriting, sharing private thoughts noted during his residency, such as ‘It’s Been Good, I’ll Cry Too, I See You, Last’.

A second Outsiders residency followed at LABottega, yielding ‘Pietra Counter’, by Berlin studio Yont. It’s a modular listening bar built from marble tile offcuts supplied by Bloc Studios, the tiles lifted from the floor of its founder Sara Ferron Cima’s grandparents’ house.

Currently in residency are Jacob Egeberg and Laurids Gallée, both at work on marble discarded by the quarries above the town. Egeberg is setting thin, reflective surfaces on rough offcuts; Gallée is turning large reclaimed slabs into tabletops, steadied on smaller milled blocks that keep the stone’s irregularity in view.

Vestigia 2026

Egeberg is also showing work at Vestigia 2026 – the latest edition of the design platform, running at Villa Marie in Vorno near Lucca, until 26 September 2026 – where his work ‘Erratic’, a two-sided mirror in stainless steel whose fluid form is interrupted by two rock-like pieces of anodised aluminium, floats above a run of lavender.

The show's location is an 18th-century estate that its owners, Marleen and Luc Van Marcke, spent seven years restoring. Titled ‘Don’t Call Me Collectible!’ and curated by Cosimo Bonciani (founder of the Florence practice Bunker Studio and himself one of the exhibitors), this year’s Vestigia places work throughout the villa’s cultivated gardens, in a Lucchese landscape made muse by those like artist John Singer Sargent, who painted the nearby gardens of Villa di Marlia in watercolour in 1910.

Here, the lake, clipped shade, stone and late Tuscan glare give the pieces a grammar to answer to. Vestigia’s founder, Jonathan Bocca, shows ‘Silenti’, made with lighting specialist Ombre-1; anthropomorphic forms in Geolite, a mineral-based material, are lit from within, inviting visitors to walk beneath.

In a deliberate provocation, Bonciani frames the show against ‘collectible design’, the market category that has attached itself to work sitting between art and craft. His case, which draws from design historian Glenn Adamson, is that such labels exist mainly to sort and sell whatever escapes industrial production; the objects themselves belong to something older and less tidy, that is, studio craft and field research. Bonciani takes licence from Carlo Mollino’s line, ‘Everything is permitted, provided it is fantastic!’, to move across design, craft, sculpture and material research without tidying them into a market category.

‘The protagonist here is nature; we are secondary,’ says designer Costantino Gucci of his work ‘Altera’, a mirrored monolith that emerges from the villa’s lake. A slender oval split into two angled planes, it reflects the water and trees around it, so that whoever stands in front of it finds the surroundings looking back at them, and the sculpture all but dissolves into them.

A fragment of Breccia Medicea, the historic Apuan stone that carries the Medici name, anchors ‘Rudis’, the first work that Francesco Maria Messina has made with Acquasanta Edizioni. Its surface is left much as the stone was found, and reclaimed steel blades run through it, the spent tools of the stone-cutting itself, carrying the horizontal planes of a shelf.

Nèemĕsi’s ‘11.07 Violet’, meanwhile, takes a derelict slab of travertine, its broken edges left as they are, lacquers it in high-gloss violet and stands it on a hand-curved metal base. The studio’s piece is presented here by Movimento, the Milan gallery representing several designers at Vestigia this year, also including Tipstudio.

Tableau is also showing at Vestigia 2026, with Bloc Studios, the Carrara marble studio co-founded by Sara Ferron Cima in 2014. Together they present ‘Isole’, a cluster of vessels in veined marble and translucent onyx designed by Iversen with Elsa De Mori, each carved into an organic form, as if shaped by water and erosion.

At Villa Marie’s entrance, Iversen’s ‘Mikado Bamboo’ hangs white limonium from a bamboo gate, the flowers cut in Pietrasanta. By the pool sits the bronze ‘B-fora’ (a play on ‘amphora’) by IAMMI, the studio of Nicolau dos Santos and Stephanie Blanchard. The curve of a buttock is worked into the piece's feminine body, the metal oxidised with acid to a shifting, gold-toned patina, which Blanchard describes as melting into its surroundings.

Pietrasanta and Vorno make a Tuscan double bill, two projects and one line of research. The category they push against is older than it sounds: furniture collected as art goes back to the ‘art furniture’ of 1870s England, made to blur the line the Royal Academy kept between the fine and the decorative, and to furnish the houses of connoisseurs. What Outsiders does at La Stellata and what Vestigia does in the gardens at Villa Marie is to turn the focus back towards the workshop and the quarry, with objects that are valued for how they came to be and for what they were before. Whatever you call it, ‘collectible’ is the least of it.