Pastina Drew a Pile of Stone, Then Upholstered It

Collectible Design · Como

Reading time: 10 min

Pastina drew Soft Monuments as a heap of masonry and then built it out of padding. Three metres forty of upholstered volume now sits on an eighteenth-century chequerboard floor at Lake Como, keeping the scale of a monument and giving up everything that made one hard to be near.

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It has come to rest rather than been placed. On the black and white marble of a salon at Villa Saporiti, under a crystal chandelier and a painted ceiling, there is a cream mass about the size of a small car: a long arcing tube of padding with a boulder of a head at one end, curled in on itself like something asleep. Ochre leather straps run across it at intervals, cinched tight, the way bands are put round a bale or a stone block before it is lifted.

This is Soft Monuments, the first work in which the research of Pastina, the Rome studio founded in 2016 by Domenico Santoro and Francesca Puddu, takes a sculptural, author-driven turn. It is showing in the Contemporary Design Selection at the Lake Como Design Festival from 12 to 20 September 2026, and it measures 340 by 200 by 120 centimetres: bigger than any sofa, smaller than a room.

The studio describes the starting point as an everyday Roman observation, that ancient monuments have sat inside daily life for centuries and quietly changed the places around them. What makes the piece work is that they did not chase the look of a monument. They isolated one property, scale, and moved it into a material that cannot support anything. Everything else about a monument, its hardness, its permanence, its refusal to be touched, has been left behind on purpose. It is a question other studios are working on this month too, in Haya Jarrar’s London debut, where the softest material in the room does the structural thinking.

The drawings are of stone, and the object is not

Pastina’s drawings for the piece give the game away, and they are the most useful thing in the project. They are quick pen studies on loose sheets, and what they show is piles of blocks: rough stacked masses, boulders resting on boulders, the kind of heap you get at the base of a quarry or in the corner of a Roman excavation where the fallen pieces have been gathered and left. They are drawings of rubble.

Then look at the finished object and the rubble is still there, volume for volume. The separate masses have not been smoothed into a single sofa-like form. They are still legible as distinct lumps that have come to rest against each other, and the seams between them are still doing the work the joints between blocks do in the drawings. The translation is one-to-one. What changed is not the composition, only the density.

That explains the straps. Hammered leather, ochre against cream, they cross the mass at the points where a stack of stone would need binding, and they are the only element that reads as engineering rather than as body. On an object with no structure to express, they are the memory of one.

Three metres forty, and why that is the difficult number

The measurement that matters is the one in the middle. At 120 centimetres high the piece is above the back of any armchair and well below a doorway. At 340 long it exceeds a three-seat sofa. It has landed in the gap where an object is too large to be furniture and too small to be architecture, which is a genuinely awkward size to design for, because nothing in a room offers a reading for it.

That awkwardness is the point. Furniture tells you what to do with it: a seat height says sit, an arm says here. This offers none of those instructions. Its lowest sections are around knee height and its highest are around chest height, so a body finds its own way in, and the photographs show people doing exactly that, leaning back against the flank, sitting on the floor beside it, lying along it. Sitting becomes a consequence of the shape rather than an instruction from it.

The composition is not fixed either. The volumes can expand, contract and be recombined, so the object is a set of relationships rather than a single silhouette. Santoro and Puddu put it in terms of threshold: as they describe it, there comes a moment when stone stops being an obstacle and becomes a way through.

A studio that has been building plinths since 2021

Soft Monuments is presented as Pastina’s first move into sculptural, author-driven work, and in one sense it is. In another it is the conclusion of an argument the studio has been making in production furniture for ten years, and the archive makes that unusually clear.

In 2021 they designed a collection for Punto Design called Plint, which won a European Product Design Award the following year. It is street furniture: sinuous metal seats that appear to float above monolithic concrete bases. The soft thing sits on the heavy thing, and the heavy thing is a plinth, which is what the name says. Five years later they have removed the base and upholstered the plinth itself.

The rest of the archive points the same way. Area for Midj, which won a Red Dot in 2021, begins with the childhood habit of building dens out of cushions and treats the cushion as a generative module, producing what the studio calls micro-architectures. Bold for Billiani, from the same year, is described as a flexible architecture assembled from upholstered parts. Curve for Punto Design took a Good Design Award in 2022 for a modular system built to organise public space. In every case the seating is being asked to behave like building, which is a thread running through Italian collectible design at the moment, from Nilufar’s hotel built inside a Milanese factory onwards.

Two more pieces are worth holding alongside it. Tito, made for Atipico in 2017, is a set of wall hooks carved from Portoro, Marquinia and Carrara marble, taking point, line and surface as their three forms. The studio has worked in exactly the material that Soft Monuments now sets down. And Nuba, released this year as the first of their limited Signature Objects, is a tangerine glazed ceramic built from a single extruded decagonal section that produces both the chimney and the pedestal from one geometry, described by the studio through the grammar of classical architecture. Nuba is a classical order at desk scale. Soft Monuments is a classical mass at room scale. Both were made in 2026.

Two Romans, two degrees each, and a jewellery house

The biographies are worth reading side by side, because they are almost the same document. Domenico Santoro was born in Potenza in 1982, Francesca Puddu in Rome in 1983. Both graduated from Sapienza University of Rome in 2006 and again in 2009, and both took an industrial design degree first, his in industrial design and hers in industrial design and visual communication, followed by the same second degree in interior architecture and exhibition design. That second degree is the one to notice here. It is the training for making things at the scale of a room that are not the room, which is precisely the problem Soft Monuments sets itself.

They have been working together since well before the studio. In 2012 they founded a brand called Italian Goodies, which reached 35 retailers across Italy and Europe within two years. Between 2013 and 2015 they both taught product design at IED in Rome, and both have taught at the Accademia delle Arti e Nuove Tecnologie there since 2022. Santoro has been on the roll of the Order of Architects of Rome since 2019.

The commercial thread is the interesting one. Between 2022 and 2024 Santoro was design advisor and consultant to Bulgari’s Gift and Home collection, leading design, development and coordination; Puddu consulted on the same collection in 2022 and 2023. Their work has shown at the Venice Biennale and MAXXI, and at Salone del Mobile, IMM Cologne and Watches and Wonders. The awards run from a German Design Award in 2020 for the Lazy sofa to an ADI Design Index selection the same year, which carried a Compasso d’Oro nomination, for a project that was not furniture at all: Aria, an open-source guide for making a face mask at home, released free during the pandemic.

Groma, and a city that was laid out with one

For Como the piece is upholstered in a special edition of Groma, a textile Pastina developed with the Amsterdam innovation studio BYBORRE. The cloth comes out of the studio’s research into the unintended marks that human activity leaves on landscape, worked up into a woven pattern, and up close it has a fine crumpled ribbing that holds shadow in the folds rather than lying flat.

The name is the part worth sitting with. A groma is the instrument Roman surveyors used to set out right angles on the ground: a staff carrying a rotating horizontal cross with a plumb bob hanging from each of its four arms, sighted along to lay out roads, camps and the rectangular land divisions of centuriation. It is the tool that put the grid on Europe, and it is the most deliberate mark-making device the ancient world produced.

So a cloth patterned from accidental traces carries the name of the instrument of intentional ones. And it arrives in Como, which is not an incidental address: the city began as Novum Comum, founded by Julius Caesar in 59 BC and set out on the orthogonal Roman street pattern that the walled centre still follows. A Roman studio has brought a textile named after the Roman surveying instrument to a town the Romans surveyed.

Confine, and an object that sits on the line

The eighth edition of the festival is themed Confine, which the organisers define not as a line that separates but as a space of crossing and exchange. Objects that belong cleanly to one category have a hard time with a brief like that. This one does not have to try: it is neither sculpture nor furniture, and the studio says as much, describing it as a presence the space recognises before it can define it.

It is the second time this season that an Italian house of this kind has been handed to designers, after Artemest filled a Venetian palazzo for Homo Faber, and it helps that Villa Saporiti is making its own debut as the festival’s principal venue this year, a late eighteenth-century lakeside house whose plan turns in on itself around an elliptical hall. The Contemporary Design Selection is curated by Giovanna Massoni with Francesca Prandelli as chief coordinator, drawing submissions from around thirty countries, and it deliberately favours work that sits across design, art and research rather than finished product.

The placement does the rest. Put a cream mass of padding on a two-hundred-year-old marble chequerboard under a chandelier and the room supplies the comparison for free. Everything else in that salon is hard, cold, symmetrical and fixed. The new arrival is warm, asymmetric, and has clearly rolled to a stop. It is the only thing in the room that could be moved by two people, and it is the largest object there.

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Final thoughts

There is a version of this project that would have been much easier to make and much less interesting to look at, in which a sofa is given a rough finish and called monumental. Pastina have done the harder thing. They have taken one property of a monument, its scale, established that scale precisely at 340 by 200 by 120, and then removed every other quality that usually comes with it. Nothing about the object pretends to be stone. The straps are leather, the mass is padding, and the drawings it came from were of rubble.

What is left is the effect a monument has on a room without any of the means a monument normally uses to get it. As Santoro and Puddu put it, softness is not the absence of monumentality but its reinterpretation in a more intimate form, and the proof is that the thing works from across the salon and again from six inches away, which is not true of most objects at either scale.

Soft Monuments is on view in the Contemporary Design Selection at Villa Saporiti, Como, as part of the Lake Como Design Festival, until 20 September 2026.