Fifty Makers, One Venetian House: Inside Artemest’s Ca’ Riflesso

EXHIBITIONS · VENICE

Reading time: 11 min

Artemest has taken a late 1940s house in Dorsoduro and filled it with the work of fifty-one Italian makers, arranged as though somebody lives there. The name is the clue to how it should be read. In Venice, calling a building a Ca’ rather than a Palazzo was never a matter of size.

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Ca’ Riflesso opened on 1 September 2026 at Casa Sanlorenzo in Dorsoduro, and runs until 30 September. It is Artemest’s contribution to Homo Faber in Città, the city-wide strand of Homo Faber 2026, and it fills two floors of a Venetian house with furniture, lighting, glass, textiles, ceramics and art by more than fifty Italian artisans.

The creative direction is by Ippolita Rostagno, who co-founded Artemest in 2015 and has been its creative director since. The conceit she has built the house on is that nothing in it is on display. Objects appear to have just arrived, been chosen, moved, or left half finished. A book is open. A table is laid and not cleared.

That is a harder thing to stage than a gallery hang, and it is the whole argument of the project. Craft here is not presented as a category of object. It is presented as the evidence that somebody has been living in a room.

The name says so before you reach the door.

Why it is a Ca’ and not a Palazzo

Ca’ is short for casa, house, and riflesso is Italian for reflection. Read quickly, the name is a pretty compound about a house of mirrors on a lagoon.

Read properly, the first half carries five hundred years of Venetian etiquette. By ancient law in the Republic, only one building in Venice was permitted to call itself a palace, and that was the Doge’s, the seat of the head of state. Every other house in the city, however enormous, however gilded, however many hundreds of merchant fortunes went into its water gate, had to settle for being a Ca’. It is why Ca’ d’Oro and Ca’ Rezzonico are still called what they are called, while later centuries relaxed and let almost everything else become a palazzo.

So the Venetian habit of the understatement is baked into the vocabulary. The grandest private houses in the city are named house. Rostagno has picked the older word, and it does exactly the work the installation needs: a Ca’ is somewhere you live, and a palazzo is somewhere you are received.

Every decision inside follows from that. Nothing sits on a plinth. There are no vitrines. The rooms are arranged as a sequence a person would move through rather than a route a visitor is walked along, and the objects are positioned at the heights and angles that use, not display, would put them at. Turning a room of things for sale into somewhere that reads as lived in is a move Nina Yashar made inside her own Nilufar gallery, for a different reason and to a similar effect.

Casa Sanlorenzo is a white box, and that is the point

The house itself was built between 1942 and 1948, a modern building in a city that mostly predates the idea, standing in Dorsoduro a short walk from Punta della Dogana and the Basilica di Santa Maria della Salute. It spent more than a decade empty, wrapped in ivy, reachable only across a broken wooden bridge.

Piero Lissoni and Lissoni & Partners restored it for Sanlorenzo, the Italian yacht builder, and it opened in June 2025 as the permanent home of Sanlorenzo Arts. The brief Lissoni set himself was subtraction. Ornament came out. The interior was pared back to a flexible white volume of a little over 500 square metres across two exhibition floors, with cement resin floors and Portoro stone, and steel and glass windows that carry an unmistakable debt to Carlo Scarpa’s work at the Querini Stampalia.

The original staircase could not be saved, so Lissoni drew a new one that follows the line of the old and is made entirely of glass and steel. Outside there is a garden of around 600 square metres, which in Venice is an extravagance, laid out around water and concrete basins. Reaching it means crossing a new bridge Lissoni designed to replace the broken one: prefabricated metal, humpbacked like a medieval Venetian crossing, surfaced in Istrian stone cut as masegni, with a wooden handrail shaped like an oar.

For a craft exhibition this is close to an ideal container. A restored Venetian palazzo brings its own frescoes, terrazzo, stucco and centuries of accumulated detail, and every object placed inside one is read alongside all of it. A white box changes the terms. Everything a visitor registers as texture, colour, warmth or decision in Ca’ Riflesso is something a maker put there in the last few years.

Venice offers the other kind of container too, and Aman’s Palazzo Papadopoli shows what six centuries of frescoes and terrazzo give an interior when the building is meant to be the subject.

The one exception is the light, which no one in Venice controls.

Fifty-one names, and a fifty-second on every curtain

The roster runs to fifty-one makers and houses. Rubelli, who wove the fabric for every curtain in the exhibition, makes fifty-two.

Several of them are among the deepest continuous practices in European decorative arts, and the dates in their own names tell you most of it. Geminiano Cozzi Venezia 1765 carries its founding year as its trading name and still makes porcelain in the Venetian tradition that Cozzi established when Venice was an independent republic. Tessitura Luigi Bevilacqua was founded in 1875, and Luigi Bevilacqua built it around looms he recovered from the silk school of the Serenissima; the house still weaves soprarizzo velvet on them, by hand, at a pace measured in centimetres. Rubelli dates to 1889, when Lorenzo Rubelli bought the Venetian weaving mill of G.B. Trapolin. Jesurum descends from the nineteenth-century revival of Burano lace, the campaign that pulled a needle technique back from the edge of extinction after the Venetian lace trade collapsed.

Glass carries the largest share of the show, which in this city is the expected answer and in this house turns out to be the interesting one. Venini, on Murano since 1921, sits alongside Micheluzzi Glass, NasonMoretti, Fornace Mian, Simone Crestani, Incalmi, WonderGlass and Glas Italia. Metal comes from Zanetto, Mingardo and Greggio. Stone and surface from Kreoo, Lithos Design and Cimento. Porte Italia and Bottega Vazzoler handle joinery and decorative woodwork, Once Milano and Tessitura Bevilacqua the textiles, Pieces of Venice the objects made from reclaimed Venetian material, and Andrea Morucchio, Luca Polato, Giusto Pilan and Nicola Tessari are among the individual artists and makers named in their own right rather than under a workshop.

Rostagno has been explicit that the weighting towards Veneto was deliberate. Working mainly with artisans from the region, she says, was a way of celebrating the depth of craftsmanship rooted in that territory, from glass and lighting through to furniture, textiles, décor and art.

The effect of that concentration is that Ca’ Riflesso reads as a regional portrait rather than a national sampler. A house furnished from all twenty Italian regions would have been a catalogue. A house furnished largely from one lagoon is a place. Venice has a habit of rewarding contemporary names who work through a house with centuries behind it, which is what Daniel Arsham did for Venice 3024 with a French casting workshop that has been operating since 1794.

Riflesso, and why glass does the heavy lifting

The second half of the name is the one that connects Artemest’s house to the festival it sits inside.

Homo Faber 2026 is titled An Island of Light, runs across the same dates on San Giorgio Maggiore, and is presented by the Michelangelo Foundation for Creativity and Craftsmanship with the Fondazione Giorgio Cini. Its artistic director is Es Devlin, the British artist and stage designer, whose subject for three decades has been what light does to a space and to the people standing in it. Devlin’s brief for the edition is the relationship between light, material and the human hand, staged across the island’s halls with live making, and presented by ninety design and applied arts students acting as Young Ambassadors.

Set that theme down in Venice and glass stops being a souvenir material and becomes the argument. Glass is the one substance in the house that is made with light, worked while it is still glowing, and then spends the rest of its life handing light back. Put it in a room with water outside the window and the city does half the work: Venetian light arrives twice, once from the sky and once off the canal, and it moves all day.

Riflesso is the hinge. In a white interior, with the lagoon throwing a second light up onto the ceilings, a hand blown vessel is not a decorative object in a corner. It is an instrument that registers the weather. The show does not need to explain the theme of the festival it belongs to, because the material does it in real time.

Reflection is also how the house handles the visitor. Mirrors, polished metal and glass put the person looking into the scene they are looking at, which is a neat way of insisting that a domestic interior only completes itself when somebody is standing in it.

From a room in Milan to a house in Venice

Artemest has been building towards this for four years, and it is worth tracing, because Ca’ Riflesso is a change of scale rather than a one-off.

The company’s recurring format is L’Appartamento, staged each April during Milan Design Week, in which international interior studios are each given a room in a palazzo and furnish it entirely from Artemest’s makers. At Palazzo Donizetti in April 2026, five studios took a city each, Venice, Naples, Rome, Palermo and Florence, and the Pompeii-inspired garden turned out to be the room that explained the rest. The 2025 edition put six studios and 180 artisans through the same building. The thread goes back further than that: Artemest was staging a pink villa in Milan in 2018, long before the format had a name.

Ca’ Riflesso inverts three things about that format at once. There is one creative director rather than six studios, so the house has a single voice. The makers are concentrated in one region rather than drawn from the whole country. And the show is in the city it is about, which means the reference material is not a mood board but the view from the window.

It also runs for a month rather than a design week, in a permanent venue, during a festival built specifically around craft rather than around furniture launches. The audience is different, and so is what the objects are being asked to prove.

How to see it, and what else is happening

Ca’ Riflesso is open to the public at Casa Sanlorenzo, Dorsoduro 170, from 1 September to 30 September 2026. It sits within Homo Faber in Città, the strand of the festival that spreads beyond San Giorgio Maggiore into Venice, Murano and Burano, where workshops listed in the Homo Faber Guide open their doors and exhibitions are staged across the city through the month.

The main exhibition on San Giorgio Maggiore is ticketed separately and occupies the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, including the Piscina Gandini, the island’s disused swimming pool, which Devlin’s team has turned over to the show.

Dorsoduro is the right district to build a craft house in. Punta della Dogana and the Salute are minutes away, the Accademia and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection are a short walk, and the vaporetto from San Giorgio lands close enough that the two halves of the festival can be done in a day.

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

The easy version of a craft exhibition is a room of beautiful objects with labels, and it works, because the objects are beautiful.

Ca’ Riflesso is doing something more demanding, and the name is the instruction manual. It asks to be read as a house, in a city whose language has always insisted that even the grandest private building is only a house. It furnishes that house from one region rather than a whole country, in a white interior that leaves the makers nothing to hide behind. And it lets the lagoon light do the curating, moving across glass and metal and velvet from morning to evening so that the room is never twice the same.

The objects in it are for sale, and Artemest is a commercial platform, which is worth saying plainly. But the case the house makes is not about acquisition. It is that a hand made object earns its place by being used, and the most persuasive way to prove that is to put it somewhere it looks used.