To live in a space is to domesticate it, to make it a personal domus. It’s no accident that this Latin word, at the root of so many others, refers to the private sphere. In the act of shaping our surroundings, we all become designers of our own domestic life. But what does that look like when design is also your profession? The answer lies inside the home of Chiara Caselli and Francesco Carrasso, also known as Ccontinua + mamt, an Italian couple based in Amsterdam.
Francesco Marano
Francesco Marano
Their apartment is filled with objects that together form an intimate gallery — a layering of personal collections and symbolic presences in which every element seems chosen by feeling rather than design. This depth is echoed in the work of photographer Francesco Marano (EllerStudio), whose images, taken with the designers inside their own home, read the space as a narrative device rather than a simple container.
Francesco Marano
Francesco Marano
Ccontinua + mamt grew out of two practices that share an architectural grounding but speak in different languages: Chiara’s work in ceramics on one side, and on the other, Francesco’s graphic and decorative sensibility, shaped in part by his background in tattooing. The result is a body of work that moves between material and mark, between object and story, hovering in uneasy balance between the archaic and the contemporary. At the heart of this drive is a precise tension: transforming the domestic object into a narrative surface. Their first plates, from 2021 — hand-thrown and then incised as if into skin — open onto a dimension in which the everyday act of eating becomes an occasion to activate the imagination, to let stories, words, and visual fragments rise to the surface. The food disappears. The mark remains.
Francesco Marano
Francesco Marano
As the work develops, the scale grows — and with it, the complexity. Ceramics become sculptures, totems, fountains. At Edit Napoli in 2022, the duo took home the prize with a project exploring materiality and its relationship with water. Dark clays and volcanic sands are combined, and water enters as an active, unstable presence — something that resists full control. In this shift, the work takes on an almost ritual dimension, and the objects are no longer simply things to be used, but to be moved through, observed, and listened to.
Francesco Marano
Francesco Marano
This creative logic is reflected in the home itself, where everything feels in flux. The domestic space, never quite finished, is continually rewritten by the objects that inhabit it — pieces chosen from their own production and that of others, alongside found objects, folk traditions, and multiple identities that drift slowly through the rooms. Amulets collected on travels, fragments of childhood, residual materials — shells, religious cards, fabrics, photographs — arrange themselves into small domestic compositions that form and dissolve according to shifting moods, temporary energies, and phases of work. The rooms flow into one another — the mezzanine descending via a discreet wooden staircase in typical Dutch fashion — while mirrors, tapestries, and vessels from exhibitions around the world sit alongside generous glazing that makes light the true protagonist, together with pieces brought in from both their studios.
Francesco Marano
Francesco Marano
Then the duo’s vocabulary comes into sharper focus: an avowed emotional primitivism drawing on folklore, ancestral symbols, and iconographies that are simple on the surface yet richly layered beneath, combined with recognizable design pieces and a sensibility that’s both light and shifting — fluid across disciplines, materials, and ideas. Mermaids, moons, serpents, incised words: elements that don’t avoid meaning but embrace it, asking the viewer to complete the story. Alongside these, their own works in progress — prototypes, sketches, pieces still waiting to be completed — turn the home into a testing ground, a direct extension of the creative process, where the boundary between life and work simply doesn’t exist. Here too, everything is continuity, and every element contributes to defining an atmosphere.
Francesco Marano
Francesco Marano
The narrative, at home, stays open. Visitors eat from their plates, drink from their cups, read the marks, move among objects that are never neutral. It’s an experience that has less to do with the space itself and more with the possibility of recognizing within it a form of identity. And perhaps that’s precisely the point: for Ccontinua + mamt, to inhabit is not to organize but to evoke. Not to design in order to establish order or impose hierarchy, but to activate a presence. Space here does not contain. It gives back.
Francesco Marano
Francesco Marano