Share
Marazzi. Under the Skin is a publishing project that celebrates Marazzi’s 90th anniversary, where ceramics become a narrative material, capable of telling the story of the identity of spaces and those who inhabit them.
In the volume, An Imagined House — a fantasy villa designed by British designer Charlotte Taylor — brings to life six rooms suspended between reality and vision, where Marazzi’s surfaces, colors, and textures create intimate and evocative atmospheres.
In this context, seven authors and creative studios were invited to share their connection with a space in the home, weaving together personal memories, design reflections, and material inspirations.
For Studio Zaven, the bedroom is the silent heart of the home, a place of intimacy, memory, and transformation. Amid daily rituals and cherished objects, the space opens up to real life. Ceramics, with their ability to refract light and tell stories, become a tailored garment that clothes the home and amplifies its identity.
“The first house we lived in together was a ground-floor apartment in the Cannaregio district of Venice, inside a courtyard where we constantly organized barbecues with friends. The garden was enormous, the house tiny, like a small wooden cabin: the ceiling was very low, little light came in through the small windows, and the only door was the one leading from the bedroom to the bathroom. One day there was an extraordinary high tide, and we found ourselves with a flooded house and the bed — a tubular structure, in red metal — floating inside the room. A few hours later, once the tide had receded, we carried it outside into the garden to dry, along with the rest of the furniture. Luckily, the sun came out in the following days. Not by chance, on that occasion we lost a Japanese holy card that was supposed to protect us from natural disasters.
All the houses we have lived in have been a sort of open space, with an idea of openness and continuity between the living area and the sleeping area. In the house where we live now, for example, the doors are full-height, like slits in the wall, but they are always open. Once, we had to wax the bedroom floors, so we moved all the furniture and built a kind of camp in the living room, with mattresses on the floor for our children. We had a picnic, watched a movie, chatted with the lights off, and then went to sleep. The bedroom was no longer the bedroom, but invaded the rest of the house and created a situation of total sharing. On Sunday mornings, on the other hand, the movement is reversed: after breakfast, we all go back to bed and from there we read something, have another coffee, call friends and family.
In front of the bed there are two objects we inherited from people we loved: a dresser with rounded corners, in cherry wood, and a Castiglioni Arco lamp, which we put in the bedroom because it didn’t fit anywhere else. They are an unusual pair, but we like waking up and seeing them every morning, before choosing our clothes and deciding the energy of the day. We designed the bed ourselves some time ago. The frame has very tall legs, the mattress is thick. For the headboard, we took a wooden board, covered it with foam rubber and draped a piece of fabric over it, then fastened everything with a staple gun. Every now and then we change the fabric and color. It’s a bit punk and also makes us laugh, considering that for work we sometimes design beds for design companies.
The bedroom is the room in the house where we all spend most of our time, at least eight hours a day, even if we do so mostly in a state of unconsciousness, while we sleep. For this reason, beyond the fact that in the future it may become smaller or merge with other rooms in the house, it is essential that it remains a healthy place, in terms of humidity, exposure, air circulation, and orientation with respect to the earth’s axis.
The tile, which was originally created as a functional cladding for kitchens and bathrooms, for us is like a pixel that helps us compose the image, and can end up covering floors and walls, both the interior and
exterior of a domestic space. It’s a kind of garment you put on the house, warming it and softening the roughness of construction aspects. It’s the tailor-made touch that makes it suitable for the people who will live in it and those who will come after. The ability to work on the texture, color, and grout lines makes the tile an object with a wider range of experimentation compared to other materials. We like it when it’s glazed because it refracts light in a constantly changing way, amplifying the perception of a three-dimensional space.
Here’s one thing about the bedroom we don’t agree on: the light that should filter into the room in the morning. So we negotiated that the shutters of the window nearest the bed stay closed, while those of the window farther from the bed remain open. This couple’s compromise also has a beautiful consequence: when there’s a full moon, the waves of the water in the canal below our window are reflected onto the ceiling of the room. We fall asleep gazing at the shimmer of the lagoon above us.” – Zaven
Contribution: Studio Zaven
Images: Charlotte Taylor
Floor: Slow Pomice and Crogiolo Terramater Cotto
Bedhead: Crogiolo Terramater Struttura Losanga Cotto
Studio Zaven
Zaven is a design studio based in Venice, founded in 2008 by Enrica Cavarzan and Marco Zavagno. The studio is engaged in the fields of art, architecture, design, and communication, with activities ranging from furniture to exhibition setups, product design to installations, graphics to art direction. Over the years, the studio has won numerous awards, including the XXVIII Compasso d’Oro ADI in 2024.
