EDIT Napoli 2025
October 10–12
Certosa e Museo di San Martino
Loggia del Priore
Largo San Martino 5, 80129 Naples
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Poltronova presents
Terrazzo Quarry by Bethan Laura Wood
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A completely new seating system joins the Poltronova collection.
After the engines of Milan Design Week have cooled down and following the great success of the re-editions of Califfo and Crazy Horse by Ettore Sottsass jr., Poltronova heads south and arrives at EDIT Napoli alongside Bethan Laura Wood.
Now in its seventh edition, EDIT Napoli — a fair dedicated to authorial and independent design — will take place from 10 to 12 October with a widespread program involving three symbolic venues of the Neapolitan capital: Castel Sant’Elmo, Villa Floridiana, and the Certosa di San Martino. It is within this context that Poltronova takes its place.
The installation, conceived by creative director Donatello D’Angelo for EDIT CULT at the Loggia del Priore of the Certosa, hosts the world premiere of Terrazzo Quarry, the new project designed by Bethan Laura Wood for Poltronova. An unprecedented event in the company’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.
Bethan Laura Wood. Terrazzo Quarry. View of the installation. EDIT Napoli 2025. Photo: Serena Eller
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.
Within the centuries-old Loggia del Priore, embedded in the rock of the Vomero hill, Poltronova stages an imaginary quarry: an artificial landscape in which the seats are surrounded by foam blocks sculpted as if they were geological strata, made of the same technical material as the upholstery.
The real and the artificial, the mineral and the decorative alternate and blur into a free and multisensory composition, where matter speaks the language of radical design, inviting visitors to explore, observe, and inhabit an inner landscape.
