Terrazzo QuarryPoltronova2025

Terrazzo Quarry is a soft yet monumental seating system, conceived as a habitable artificial landscape. A group of upholstered elements — usable in a compact configuration or scattered freely in space — resemble rocks emerging from an imaginary ground, where material and decoration merge into a single expressive entity.

The “Terrazzo” pattern, which gives the piece its name and covers the seats, was developed by Bethan Laura Wood in 2022, drawing on a residency in a Venetian palazzo in 2010, where she was struck by the endless variety of terrazzo floor motifs. From that memory came an exclusive fabric in which fragments of gems seem to surface from the material to rest on its surface.

With Terrazzo Quarry, surface becomes volume, pattern becomes landscape: a transition from two-dimensionality to three-dimensional experience, poised between illusion and structure, inviting one to interact, climb, and linger. A “super fake” terrazzo — as Wood herself defines it — extracted from a psychedelic landscape, in dialogue with the unconventional vision of the Poltronova archive: an imaginary topography where material becomes experience, play, and narrative.

The project represents an unprecedented event in the Poltronova’s history: for the first time since the foundation of the Poltronova Study Centre under the direction of Roberta Meloni, an original project — not drawn from the historical archive — becomes part of the collection.

Images by Centro Studi Poltronova and Serena Eller.