Ceccotti Collezioni ⭐ Top pick

Solid wood as sculpting material, not industrial raw material. Since 1956, the Cascina workshop carves walnut, cherry and ash with hands trained for generations. Ceccotti curves are impossible in a factory. That's the entire argument.

1956, Cascina, Tuscany. Franco Ceccotti opens a cabinetmaking workshop in a region where woodworking is a centuries-old art. Cascina, a small town between Pisa and Florence, has been a land of carpenters and cabinetmakers since the Renaissance. Artisans here maintain a relationship with solid wood that the furniture industry largely abandoned long ago.

Franco starts like others: classic Tuscan furniture, local commissions, hand work. But in the 1980s, the meeting with designer Roberto Lazzeroni changes everything. Lazzeroni, from Pisa and therefore a neighbor, brings contemporary vision to traditional know-how. Together they develop a unique language: organic, fluid, sculpted forms unlike anything in industrial furniture. Wood is not raw material here, it is a sculptural medium.

What sets Ceccotti apart from other high-end makers such as B&B Italia, Cassina, and Molteni is solid wood. While Italian design furniture often relies on veneered MDF, metal, and leather, Ceccotti works solid walnut, cherry, and ash. Every piece is carved, turned, and assembled by cabinetmakers trained at the local Cascina school, in a training tradition that goes back generations.

Ceccotti curves are impossible in industrial production. The Ico armchair, designed by Lazzeroni, has a walnut structure with sinuous lines that can only be obtained by hand, by a cabinetmaker who understands grain direction and knows where wood can bend and where it will break. The DC150 desk is a monolith of solid walnut with exact proportions: no visible screws, no visible joints, only wood that seems to have always had that form.

The collaboration with Poltrona Frau, the Duo Collection, unites Tolentino leather with Cascina wood. Two Italian crafts of exceptional level meet in one piece of furniture. This is the kind of partnership possible in Italy, where territories of expertise are so clearly defined that a leather maker and a cabinetmaker can be 300 km apart and still produce an object that looks made by one hand.

The Cascina workshop employs around fifty artisans. Output is limited, a few thousand pieces per year, no more. Each piece takes weeks to produce. Wood is selected, naturally dried (not accelerated kiln drying), machined, then hand-finished. Varnishes are transparent, so grain, knots, and natural variations remain visible. Ceccotti does not hide wood under lacquer, it reveals it.

Distribution is selective: Ceccotti showrooms in Milan and Shanghai, plus a premium dealer network in 40+ countries. Prices start around €2,000 for a small table and rise above €15,000 for major pieces. This is the price of solid wood worked by hands that know exactly what they are doing.

In 2021, Poltrona Frau (Haworth Group) acquired a stake in Ceccotti. Independence is now nuanced, but production remains in Cascina and the artisans are the same. The central question in these acquisitions is always identical: will the group respect artisanal pace, or push for volume? So far, Cascina has held.