In the hills above Pietrasanta a family enterprise that began as a shop in 1920 has grown into a layered design ecosystem combining hospitality, farming and curated residencies. The site on Viale Apua now operated by Serena del Soldato, functions as a restaurant, guest rooms and a gallery known as LABottega. Nearby, the del Soldato family runs an organic hillside farm called La Stellata where olive trees, a kitchen garden and small livestock form both a working landscape and a source of creative inspiration.
The relationship between place, craft and contemporary making is the throughline: designers invited to La Stellata are asked to respond to the land and the region’s material culture, then collaborate with Pietrasanta’s artisans to produce objects that enter LABottega’s collection and the rooms used by guests. This model intentionally blends hospitality with production so that the site itself becomes part of the creative process.
LABottega, La Stellata and the Outsiders residency
The most recent curatorial initiative is Outsiders developed in partnership with Tableau the Copenhagen studio and gallery founded by Julius Værnes Iversen in 2018. Tableau contributes the curatorial framework while del Soldato provides access to the local community of makers. The residency aims to root projects in the specific geology, craft skills and agricultural life of the Versilia hills rather than presenting work as decontextualized objects.
Participants are encouraged to use locally available, sometimes discarded, materials: marble offcuts from nearby quarries, leftover tiles, or organic elements from the farm. The first Outsiders resident, Willem van Hooff, produced a show titled I’m Alone With My Thoughts featuring handmade ceramic vessels—each incised with fragments of personal text noted during his stay. Other projects have included modular furniture assembled from marble tile offcuts and stone reclaimed from quarry discard.
Selected projects and makers
Design contributions over recent years illustrate the residency’s emphasis on material research. In 2022, Federica Elmo created Naturamagica transforming dried acanthus branches into a bedside table and pairing terracotta elements with powder-coated metal for a kitchen table still used at LABottega. Berlin studio Yont developed Pietra Counter a modular listening bar built from tile remnants supplied by Bloc Studios. Current residents Jacob Egeberg and Laurids Gallée are both working directly with marble offcuts: Egeberg focusing on thin reflective surfaces set into rough stone, Gallée fashioning large reclaimed slabs into tabletops that keep the stone’s natural irregularity visible.
Vestigia 2026 and the Lucca landscape
Many of the designers connected to LABottega and Outsiders also present work at regional platforms. Vestigia 2026 takes place at Villa Marie in Vorno, near Lucca, where the restored 18th-century estate owned by Marleen and Luc Van Marcke hosts site-specific installations across garden and interior. Curated by Cosimo Bonciani, this year’s edition—titled Don’t Call Me Collectible!—runs through 26 September 2026 and interrogates the market category that positions objects between art and craft.
Works shown include Jacob Egeberg’s Erratic a two-sided stainless steel mirror intersected by rock-like anodised aluminium elements and presented amid lavender beds, and Jonathan Bocca’s Silenti a collaboration with lighting specialist Ombre-1 that places internal-lit mineral forms in the villa’s shaded walks. The estate’s lake, clipped hedges and stone terraces provide a historical backdrop that asks contemporary pieces to answer questions of context and use.
Curatorial intent and local know-how
Both Outsiders and Vestigia foreground the role of local artisanship and everyday practice. Del Soldato emphasizes belonging and reciprocal exchange: hosting designers within a lived community so that hospitality is part of the creative method. Iversen describes the project as built on trust and place-specific dialogue, where the curatorial voice from Copenhagen meets centuries of Tuscan material knowledge.
That dialogue extends to the region’s design vernacular, including domestic interiors. Parallel to the residency movement, contemporary Tuscan interiors—especially kitchens—have shifted away from heavy, ornamental tropes toward lighter, sun-washed palettes and honest materials. Elements such as terracotta accessories, olive wood boards, large practical basin sinks and open shelving are now favored for their tactile authenticity and daily usefulness rather than as mere decoration.
Taken together, these developments show a design ecology where material research craft collaboration and a sense of place converge. Whether it’s a reclaimed marble tabletop made by quarry hands, a bedside table grown from dried foliage, or a kitchen that embraces terracotta and useful tools, contemporary Tuscan design in this context values stories embedded in materials as much as formal novelty.
