In Sicily, the sun is a design load in its own right. Behind a south-facing window in July, the surface of a dark worktop can exceed 60 degrees, and fabrics with low lightfastness lose their tone within a single season. We work with finishes and fabrics selected for the real exposure of each room, with room-by-room surveys and installation carried out by our own teams, from the palazzos of the Val di Noto to resorts along the coast.
Three different markets, three different projects
In the Val di Noto and in Ortigia, you’re furnishing inside the Baroque: palazzos with pavilion vaults, original cement or majolica floors, internal courtyards, limestone walls up to a metre thick. The rooms are large but irregular, with niches and splayed openings, and the design work is mostly about bringing order without touching the masonry shell. Fixings into the soft stone need chemical anchors or should be avoided altogether, and the historic floors won’t take drilling: the answer is free-standing furniture on felt pads.
In Taormina and along the Ionian coast, the typical property is a panoramic one with sheer-drop terraces. There the challenge is outdoor furniture that has to stand up to sun, salt spray and wind, with the room itself living with the French windows open. In the Trapani area, on Favignana and along the south coast, you find resorts and mid-sized properties with repeated room layouts instead, where what matters is repeatability of each piece, installation times and how well the materials hold up.
Palermo and Catania are a market of their own: urban, active all year round, with piano nobile conversions into properties of ten or twenty keys and access problems similar to those found in historic centres on the mainland.
What the sun does to furniture
The first effect is on fabrics. Curtains or upholstery with low lightfastness shift tone on the exposed side within a single season, and the room ends up with an armchair in two colours. For south and west-facing rooms we use fabrics with high lightfastness, ideally solution-dyed acrylic fibre even indoors, and we keep the darker colours for the more sheltered walls.
The second effect is on panels. A dark lacquered front behind a window heats up and moves: it warps, and the glued edges can come away. In rooms with large exposed windows we design with light colours on the fronts that get direct sun, hot-glued thick edge banding, and we keep dark lacquer finishes for the shaded areas. Outdoors, wood-based panels aren’t used at all: compact laminates, porcelain stoneware on aluminium frames, timbers suited to the climate.
The third effect is felt by the guest. A dark aluminium armrest in the sun becomes impossible to touch: on outdoor pieces we prefer light-coloured aluminium, wood or technical rope on the contact surfaces. Alongside this, the same criteria for salt-resistant materials apply on coastal properties, with stainless steel fittings and marine-grade treatments, as on properties in Sardinia.
Rooms inside a Baroque palazzo
The rooms of an eighteenth-century palazzo have walls that aren’t parallel and vaults that slope down at the sides. A full-wall headboard, in that setting, is designed with trims shaped to the laser survey and a height stopped below the springing line of the vault, generally between 220 and 240 centimetres. Above that line the masonry is left exposed, because that’s what the guest is paying for.
Bathrooms are the critical point: they’re fitted in wherever the drainage runs, so they end up with non-standard shapes and often a dropped ceiling in just one section. Washbasin units need to be drawn for the individual room, with a top in local stone or porcelain stoneware, a wall-hung base and an open back to clear exposed pipework. This kind of work on rooms with an irregular floor plan is where bespoke pays for itself: standard furniture loses you ten or fifteen centimetres per room, which across twenty rooms is an entire room.
For independent high-end properties, where every room differs from the next, the approach is that of a boutique hotel: physical samples, working drawings for each individual room, and a single point of contact from the survey through to final testing.
Recurring work across Sicilian properties
Headboards and panelling under the vault
Modular panels with the height stopped at the springing line, shaped trims, and fixings only into the mortar joints, without drilling the exposed stone.
Washbasin units on historic floors
Wall-hung bases or units on felt pads, tops in local stone, no fixings into the floor on the original cement tiles.
Furniture for internal courtyards and cloisters
Seating and tables in materials that don’t heat up in the sun, bespoke planters that define the zones without any fixed structural work.
Panoramic terraces and sun decks
Sun loungers in marine-grade aluminium, anchored shade structures, service furniture that folds away against the scirocco wind.
Reception desks in entrance halls and vaulted lobbies
Desks made of two or three units assembled on site, set back from where the vaults spring, with an enclosed technical rear.
Logistics from the mainland and working windows
Road transport from the north to Sicily takes between two and three days, ferry crossing included, and there’s no room for improvisation. We schedule complete deliveries by batch, with the consignment checked on arrival at a holding depot and staggered entry into the property. In the historic centres of Ortigia, Noto and Modica there are traffic restrictions and streets a long vehicle simply can’t get down: goods are transferred onto vans and delivered early in the morning.
The Sicilian season is long, running from April to October, and in many properties it extends further with the winter bank holiday weekends. The real windows for site work are November through the first half of December, and January and February. This is a period when the weather can complicate travel between provinces, so we build margin into the schedule and keep teams on site.
To open at Easter, the executive design needs to be signed off by October: between sample approval, production and transport, ten to fourteen weeks go by, and the production times for bespoke furniture have to be added to the days of travel. Anyone who decides in February ends up opening well into May, which means losing the first month of the season. Once you give us the floor plan, the number of keys and the opening date, we put together the quote with the calendar built backwards from that date.
Frequently asked questions
How do you stop fabrics from fading?
By choosing fabrics with high lightfastness for rooms facing south and west, and fitting technical filtering curtains. On terraces we use solution-dyed acrylics, which hold their colour for years rather than for a single season.
Can furniture be fixed to the stone in historic palazzos?
Only with suitable anchors and into the mortar joints, never into exposed stone if it’s a protected building. In most cases we design free-standing pieces that need no fixings at all, resting on the floor with internal stabilisation.
How long does it take to furnish twenty rooms in a Val di Noto palazzo?
About four months from signing: six weeks for surveys, drawings and samples, eight to ten for production, two to three for installation in batches. The final survey is done once the bathrooms and plasterwork are finished, not before.
Does transport from the mainland add much time?
It adds about a week on average compared with a delivery in northern Italy, between the journey, the ferry crossing and entry into the property. The real risk isn’t the extra time but fragmentation: we deliver in complete batches, so installation never stalls waiting for a single piece.
Do you also work on properties that stay open all year round?
Yes, in Palermo and Catania that’s the norm. We work in batches of a few rooms at a time, with agreed working hours and protected corridors, so the property stays sellable throughout.