An infuriating trend has taken over the design world over the past decade and that is collectible design. What started as a useful way to talk about objects that didn’t quite fit into art or industry has hardened into a marketing category. Stepsthe design exhibition held in the newly renovated Villa Marie in Tuscany running from July 5 to September 26, 2026opens with a statement of intent – “Don’t call me a collector!” – with the goal of rescuing the subject from a definition that its stewardship deems too narrow, insisting instead on preserving research and value.
Funded by Jonathan Muth in 2025, who is also its Creative Director, along with me Costantino Guccithe first edition of Vestigia was edited under the theme “Design in the real world”, juxtaposing frantic urban life and industrial design with a slower, local, artisanal approach. For 2026, curation is led by Cosimo Boncianifounder of Bunker Studio and Bunker Galleria, with an emphasis on research design that presents objects as traces of processes, questions and experiments.
Traces 2026: Medusa Collection by Etereo © Dario Borruto
Vestigia 2026: Silenti by Jonathan Bocca © Dario Borruto
Vestigia 2026: Daria Bench by Bunker Studio © Dario Borruto
Vestigia 2026: Daria Bench by Bunker Studio © Dario Borruto
Vestige 2026: B-outside by IAMMI © Dario Borruto
Vestigia 2026: Altera by Costantino Gucci © Dario Borruto
Traces 2026: Medusa Collection by Etereo © Dario Borruto
Vestigia 2026: Silenti by Jonathan Bocca © Dario Borruto
Vestigia 2026: Stygian originals by Tommaso Pardini © Dario Borruto
Vestigia 2026: Stygian originals by Tommaso Pardini © Dario Borruto
Vestigia 2026: Stygian originals by Tommaso Pardini © Dario Borruto
Vestigia: Don’t call me a collector!
Research design
Collectible design is the term the market has established for objects that lie between furniture and sculpture: too conceptual or complex to be mass-produced, but still functional enough not to be sold purely as art. In recent years, the term has been calcified into a genre with its own trade shows, collectors, and aesthetic. Vestigia’s objection is not about any of these things in isolation, but about letting rarity and crafting make sense. An item does not earn its place by being rare or expensive, but by showing care and research.
The substitute suggested by the show is “research planaiming to redefine the object not only as a final product but also as a visible trace of a process, a question, an experiment. It demands a kind of honesty about both the designer’s creative process and the manufacturing methods used to create it. objectiveinviting the viewer to transparently understand and evaluate what they are looking at.
The philosophy is inseparable from the place where the show takes place, in Tuscany, a place where art and architecture have been intertwined for centuries between Renaissance cities and marble quarries. The works are installed outdoors in the garden of Villa Marie, refusing the shelter of the white cube. The exhibition featured 25 exhibitors, from local Tuscan designers and companies, such as marble producer Acquasanta Edizioni with Francesco Maria Messina, artist and designer Duccio Maria Gambito internationally recognized persons such as Laurid’s Gallee, Motion Gallery and Jacob Egeberg. Here is a selection of six exemplary projects that were presented.
Altera by Costantino Gucci
Altera is the piece that most immediately welcomes visitors, since it stands in the middle of the villa’s lake and works in symbiosis with the water. Designed by Costantino Gucciit is an object between a mirror and a sculpture. It is a mirrored monolith composed of two inclined planes that break the continuity of perspective, creating a different landscape by reflecting the surrounding elements outwards. The observer can never see himself at the center, but is deliberately kept peripheral, making the landscape the primary subject.
A concern with reflection runs more broadly through the practice of Costantino Gucci, who treats mirror and glass as unstable, living surfaces that respond to light and the bodies that move in front of them. Of individual work recently exhibited at Motion Galleryand has explored how reflective surfaces can refract and multiply an image rather than clearly returning it.
Silenti by Jonathan Bocca in collaboration with OMBRE-1
Silenti is an installation of illuminated, anthropomorphic sculptures specifically designed to be experienced through movement, walking beneath the objects and understanding their different perspectives. The material is Geolite, a high-performance mineral-based composite material chosen for a durable and tactile stone-like surface. oral Sculptures do not only decorate the landscape. they interrupt the visitor’s path and redefine the way their environment is perceived, encouraging a slower, more natural way of encountering that is very much in line with Vestigia’s broader argument against purely visual design.
Trained at IED Florence with a stint at Fabrica’s research center in Treviso, Bocca built his reputation by transforming industrial waste paper from his city’s paper mills into dense, durable sculptural composites, treating recycled matter as a way to give discarded material a second, more permanent life. Silenti carries the same instinct for transforming process-based material choices into figures that resemble living creatures.
Stygian prototypes by Tommaso Pardini
The series is a demonstration of “UFOs”, Non-functional imaginary objects from Tommaso Pardinithat take the show’s ecological undercurrent and push it towards something darker and weirder. They are carved from recycled styrofoam blocks that were display structures at Fuorisalone 2026 and are intended to evoke an oil spill, monolithic bodies that look like industrial relics or fossils.
Set against the stark and fairytale backdrop of Villa Marie, the prototypes read like excavated alien specimens, autonomous bodies that reflect, in Pardini’s words, a dark present rather than an aspirational one.
Daria Bench by Bunker Studio
The piece is made of 14 modules, each 45 by 45 cm, in Pietra Serena, the gray sandstone that has shaped the streets and facades of Florence for centuries. Each section acts as a unit that can be repeated and rearranged, making Bunker StudioThe bench is a modular system that produces visual rhythm through the alternation of solids, voids and materials rather than a single continuous form.
The work represents the meeting of two Tuscan traditions. Pietra Serena represents the architectural heritage of the area, while the foam elements refer to the tapestry traditions of Quarrata. Brass is used as a connective tissue between them, as a symbol of the relationship between the two crafts.
B-fora from IAMMI
Cast in bronze, the vase takes the classic amphora and shows what centuries of art history have kept at bay: the “b-side” of the traditional object. The piece, commissioned by Villa Marie, combines the statuesque proportions of Greek figures with the silhouette of a modern female body, presenting bare and without the curtain that usually hid it under the guise of decor.
Bronze is worked through an oxidation process in which acids react with the metal to create a changing and unpredictable pattern of gold and shadows across the surface, which i love you calls it a “vibrant finish” that works almost like aged skin.
Medusa Collection by Ethereum
The Medusa collection, designed by the studio based in Dubai and Milan Ethereal for the stone specialist Alimontis, it closes the choice in a poetic tension between the lightness of the curtain and the density of the stone. Rigid marble slabs are treated as if they were fluid fabric, folding and twisting in an organic, vertical rhythm. The collection includes floor lamps of different heights, a table lamp and a console, developing the technique in different scales and functions.
Structural lines of bronzed aluminum run through the pieces, intersecting the folds of the marble and revealing an inner sense of movement. The collection questions what materials are meant to do versus what they can do, possibly arguing that nothing is really what it seems.
