{"id":29902,"date":"2026-11-09T15:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-11-09T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.archieinteriors.com\/?p=29902"},"modified":"2026-10-06T00:05:22","modified_gmt":"2026-10-05T22:05:22","slug":"best-interior-designers-in-florence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.archieinteriors.com\/en\/best-interior-designers-in-florence\/","title":{"rendered":"The Best Interior Designers in Florence: 20 Studios and Leading Names in Interior Design"},"content":{"rendered":"

From suites overlooking the Arno to apartments carved out of the palazzi of the historic centre, 20 interior designers in Florence who work inside Italy’s most layered city without giving up a language of their own time.<\/em><\/p>\n

Florence does not allow a clean slate. Anyone designing interiors in this city almost always works inside something that already exists: a cross vault, a coffered ceiling, a fresco resurfacing beneath the plaster, a terracotta floor that nobody would dream of replacing. The historic centre has been on the UNESCO World Heritage List<\/a> since 1982, and this condition, more than any trend, defines the work of interior designers in Florence<\/strong>: to design is to negotiate with history, deciding what to preserve, what to restore and where instead to introduce a new mark, recognisable and contemporary.<\/p>\n

The city also holds an archive of domestic life like no other. At Palazzo Davanzati, the Museo della Casa Fiorentina Antica<\/a>, now part of the Bargello Museums, brings back the everyday life of a fourteenth-century merchant family, among painted walls, chests and furnishings. A few blocks away, the Opificio delle Pietre Dure<\/a>, founded in 1588 by Ferdinando I de’ Medici as a manufactory of hardstone furnishings and today an institute of the Ministry of Culture devoted to restoration, is a reminder that in Florence the interior has always been a matter of craft as well. The workshops of the Oltrarno, home to gilders, inlayers, cabinetmakers and restorers, remain the first point of contact for many of today’s designers.<\/p>\n

Yet Florence was also the place where interior space was radically called into question. In the course in interior architecture and furnishing taught by Leonardo Savioli<\/a> in the 1966-67 academic year, students designed a Piper, a leisure venue conceived as a space of participation: many of the future protagonists of Radical Architecture passed through that experience. In December 1966 the Superarchitettura exhibition at the Jolly 2 gallery in Pistoia marked the birth of Archizoom and Superstudio; in February 1969, in a former garage on Via Palazzuolo still scarred by the flood, Space Electronic opened, designed by Gruppo 9999, a nightclub that turned the interior into a total sensory experience. That season left the city a legacy less visible than its domes, yet a lasting one: the idea that an interior can be a manifesto<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Today the contemporary scene revolves around three poles. First comes hospitality: since the 1990s Florence has become a laboratory for high-end hotels, and several local studios developed here a language later exported to Capri, the Red Sea and the Alps. Then there are homes in historic palazzi, where quality is measured by the precision of the intervention rather than the number of effects. And there is yacht design, a Tuscan speciality with some of its leading studios based in the city, used to designing interiors in which every centimetre is made to measure.<\/p>\n

This selection brings together 20 interior designers and interior design studios based in Florence<\/strong> or its metropolitan area. It is not a ranking, and the order assigns no positions of merit. It is an editorial reading of the Florentine scene through designers for whom the interior is a substantial and recognisable part of their work: from the great names of hospitality to studios founded after 2010, from private homes to hotels, from restaurants to yachts.<\/p>\n

How we selected these interior designers in Florence<\/h2>\n

As with the other cities in the series, the selection is not based on the professional label each designer adopts, but on the continuity and quality of their work on interior spaces<\/strong>. In Florence many of the most interesting names are architects who approach the interior with the same depth they give to the building; others come from design, craftsmanship or creative direction in fashion; others still have built studios explicitly specialised in interiors.<\/p>\n

We considered built and documented projects, the weight of interiors in each studio’s practice, the recognisability of its language and, above all, its ability to work with existing buildings, which in Florence is the real test of a designer. The editorial team also took into account each studio’s presence in the professional debate, through publications in Italian and international magazines, awards and consistent communication of its work. Some studios also appear in our selection of architecture firms in Florence<\/a>: where interiors form an important part of their activity, the overlap simply reflects the multidisciplinary nature of that practice.<\/p>\n

The best interior designers in Florence: 20 studios and leading names in interior design<\/h2>\n

Michele B\u00f6nan<\/h3>\n

Born in Florence, where he also studied architecture, Michele B\u00f6nan<\/strong> signed his first major project in 1980, Adriano Panatta’s villa in Forte dei Marmi, which made the cover of AD. The decisive turn came in 1995 with Hotel Lungarno, the first chapter in a long partnership with the Ferragamo family’s Lungarno Collection: a white and blue interior inhabited by more than four hundred works of modern art, including pieces by Picasso and Cocteau. Gallery Hotel Art, Portrait Firenze and the J.K. Place hotels in Florence, Capri and Rome followed and, in 2022, the interiors of Portrait Milano.<\/p>\n

His is a luxury built through controlled accumulation: custom-designed furniture, antiques, works of art, fabrics and lighting that compose atmospheres rather than rooms. B\u00f6nan likes to describe himself as the director of a film, and often repeats that one should live at home as in a hotel and in a hotel as at home, a formula that neatly sums up the permeability between residential and hospitality design on which his work rests.<\/p>\n

Alongside hotels, the studio designs private residences, restaurants and yachts, and has launched the Michele B\u00f6nan Interiors line. In Florence, a historic residence restored with a contemporary eye places the owners’ art collection at its centre. His work is collected in the Assouline monograph Signature Details<\/em>, with texts by Cesare Cunaccia.<\/p>\n

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Luigi Fragola Architects<\/h3>\n

From the studio on Via Palestro, a short walk from the Arno, Luigi Fragola<\/strong> works for some of the most demanding groups in international hospitality, from Belmond to Rocco Forte Hotels and the Lungarno Collection. His most recent project is the renovation of Belmond Villa San Michele in Fiesole, which reopened in 2026: a former Franciscan monastery with 27 suites and 12 rooms, for which the studio designed interiors and landscape together with Belmond’s design team, deliberately choosing restraint over effect. In the city he also signed the renovation of The Place Firenze, on Piazza Santa Maria Novella.<\/p>\n

His residential work reveals the same sense of measure. In Home in Florence, completed in 2018 in the San Niccol\u00f2 neighbourhood, an abandoned carpentry workshop on the ground floor and the piano nobile apartment above become a single home of 350 square metres: grand doorways between the cross vaults, a mirrored and moulded wall separating the study from the kitchen, a theatrical staircase linking the two levels, vivid colours and a care for light that the studio considers a structural part of the project. The photographs are by Massimo Listri.<\/p>\n

Villa Olivuzzo, in the hills around Florence, and the cover of AD Italia in 2025 confirm a path that interprets the past as living material, able to evolve through lightness, comfort and character.<\/p>\n

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Pierattelli Architetture<\/h3>\n

Founded by Massimo Pierattelli in the early 1980s and now led together with Claudio and Andrea Pierattelli between Florence and Milan, Pierattelli Architetture<\/strong> is one of the studios that have best told the story of how Florentine hospitality has changed. From Firenze Number Nine Hotel & Spa to the more recent YellowSquare, opened in March 2022 in a former tuberculosis dispensary dating from 1935, the studio has worked across very different scales: 5,000 square metres, three hundred beds, shared spaces and a rooftop pool overlooking the skyline, with the travertine of the great portal and staircase declaring the building’s rationalist roots. The project was a finalist at The Plan Award 2022 in the Hospitality category. In the Chianti, at Radda, the studio also designed the boutique hotel Pieve Aldina.<\/p>\n

Equally significant is its residential work, often at the smallest scale. Interni featured Flat Eleven, fifty square metres overlooking Santo Spirito, as an example of architecture for minimal spaces; in 2022 the Oltrarno Apartment transformed 240 square metres in Borgo San Frediano; an apartment overlooking the basilica of Santa Croce and a period home of 130 square metres in the historic centre were published by Interni and Elle Decor Italia.<\/p>\n

The studio also appears in our architecture selection, yet its work shows with particular clarity how, in Florence, conservative restoration can become a tailored approach to the interior.<\/p>\n

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DEFERRARI+MODESTI<\/h3>\n

She is from Pisa, he is from Buenos Aires: Lavinia Modesti and Javier Deferrari<\/strong> met while working at the same Milan studio and in 2010 founded DEFERRARI+MODESTI in Florence. In an interview with Artribune they described themselves as halfway between architects and craftsmen, stressing that their work is never the search for a decorative language: colour and material serve to build a new spatial concept. It is a position legible in every project, from the La Petite venue to the BRAC bookshop caf\u00e9 and the Florence hub of Targetti.<\/p>\n

The project that brought them international recognition is Casa LG in Prato, completed in 2020: a staircase in teak and blue-painted iron, clad in perforated sheet metal, which becomes a climbing wall for the owners and grows more permeable to light as it rises. The house was published by Dezeen and, that same year, the studio was shortlisted in the Emerging interior designer of the year category at the Dezeen Awards.<\/p>\n

In Florence their work focuses on historic homes. Casa GZ, completed in 2026 on the ground floor of a nineteenth-century palazzo in Santa Croce, is organised around an inner garden; other projects, in a former convent and in a house with rediscovered frescoes, arches and a secret garden, have been published by Living and Elle Decor Italia.<\/p>\n

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Claudio Nardi Architects<\/h3>\n

Born in Prato in 1951, Claudio Nardi<\/strong> has tied an important part of his career to one of the landmarks of Florentine fashion: LuisaViaRoma, whose spaces he designed in several phases, in 1984, 1998, 2008 and again in 2019. It is rare for a studio to accompany a brand for more than thirty years, and that continuity says a great deal about his ability to update a language without betraying it.<\/p>\n

The project that best sums up his poetics is Riva Lofts, opened in 2008 along the Arno, opposite the Cascine park. A late nineteenth-century industrial complex, later home to artisan workshops and to the architect’s own studio, was converted into nine apartments for a boutique hotel in which early twentieth-century furniture and vintage modern pieces sit alongside kitchens in wood and Corian, terraces, inner gardens and a pool in white sandstone. A light, domestic atmosphere, which Wallpaper named best new hotel that year.<\/p>\n

Among the more recent works are the restyling of La M\u00e9nag\u00e8re, signed with Matteo Crociani, a series of villas between Versilia and Lake Chiusi, and the new identity of Terminal 5 at Fiumicino airport, built around an architectural backdrop almost seven metres high. A Mediterranean perspective, as the studio itself defines its research.<\/p>\n

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BUNKER Studio Firenze<\/h3>\n

Among the founders of BUNKER Studio Firenze<\/strong> is the architect Cosimo Bonciani<\/strong>, who on his profile describes himself as an architect lost in interiors, and the studio is today one of the most radical in Florence in its work with colour. The studio puts it bluntly: colour blocking is not a decorative choice, it is its favourite way of overturning the rules of space. Walls and ceilings merge into a single chromatic field, and the room stops being a closed box to become an immersive volume to move through.<\/p>\n

The method can be read in every project. In the bistro of Hotel Number Nine in Florence, enveloping seats in mustard velvet with a metal plinth stand out against a large mural wallcovering of exotic inspiration, above parquet laid in squares. In an interior beneath original frescoed vaults, a mirror-gloss green lacquer and the Taccia lamp by the Castiglioni brothers reinterpret the historic shell with contemporary rigour; elsewhere a vintage wallpaper from the historic Ub archive in Florence becomes the chromatic focus of a room. In a villa in the Valdarno hills, a deep blue partition with a site-specific intervention by Duccio Maria Gambi turns the passage between two rooms into an architectural backdrop.<\/p>\n

The covers tell the rest: Living in 2020, Elle Decoration UK in 2021, the Dutch magazine Residence and Living’s collector’s volume on the best of interior decoration 2023, as well as features in AD Italia, almost always with photographs by Helenio Barbetta. Alongside the studio, BUNKER also runs an art gallery in the city: a further sign of how, in Florence, interiors and visual culture continue to speak to each other.<\/p>\n

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LUCA DINI Design & Architecture<\/h3>\n

Founded by Luca Dini<\/strong> in Florence in 1996, the studio has two offices in the city and a showroom in Forte dei Marmi, and moves naturally between two worlds that rarely talk to each other: yacht design and urban design. Interni summed up this dual nature with a formula the studio has adopted as its own, looking at the land from the sea. The result is a transversal way of thinking, in which the millimetric precision demanded by a yacht becomes a method for architecture and hospitality too.<\/p>\n

On the yachting front, recent projects include Loewe, a 55 metre fully custom yacht built with Tankoa in 2025, with fluid lines and sculpted volumes, and the interiors of Agneta, a 55 metre Heesen yacht built around understated luxury and a rigorous selection of materials. On land the studio has worked on Sindalah, the resort island in the Red Sea with residences, restaurants, a hotel and a marina, and on five coastal projects in Albania inspired by Italian identity and the Florentine Renaissance.<\/p>\n

The bond with Florence remains explicit. Recreos, a 2025 project for the regeneration of Via Palazzuolo, redesigns the street as an accessible pedestrian space, with paving that projects onto the ground the pattern of the vault of the Pazzi Chapel framed in pietra serena: an urban interior, one might say, conceived to bring life back to the street’s shops and workshops.<\/p>\n

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Riccardo Barthel<\/h3>\n

On Via dei Serragli, in the heart of the Oltrarno, Riccardo Barthel<\/strong> has built over more than forty years a world that escapes definition: interior design, bespoke kitchens and bathrooms, handcrafted taps, handles and lamps, restoration and the search for period pieces. The Florentine space, alongside a branch in Forte dei Marmi, is at once showroom, workshop and archive of materials, and Cond\u00e9 Nast Traveler has described it as an ultra-sophisticated showroom for bespoke kitchens and bathrooms.<\/p>\n

Elle Decor has spoken of a timeless Florentine aesthetic, founded on respect for craftsmanship, for tradition and for the quality of raw materials. It is a language that rejects nostalgia as firmly as the coldness of the catalogue. The kitchen is the starting point for many projects, but the studio works on the whole home, on hospitality and on yachts, always starting from the quality of the making.<\/p>\n

Recent projects include the RAARO cocktail bar. Barthel’s presence in this selection is a reminder that in Florence interior design is born not only in architecture studios but also in workshops, where drawing and craft coincide.<\/p>\n

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q-bic<\/h3>\n

Founded in 2005 by the architect Luca Baldini<\/strong> and the designer Marco Baldini<\/strong>, q-bic is the studio that, more than any other, has designed the interiors of the contemporary Florence found outside the luxury circuit: restaurants, caf\u00e9s and hybrid spaces where people eat, shop and work. La M\u00e9nag\u00e8re, opened in 2015 as a restaurant, bar and concept store, soon became a reference point for the city; Ditta Artigianale in Sant’Ambrogio and Out of the Ordinary, inside The Student Hotel Lavagnini, continued the same line of research.<\/p>\n

Its distinctive trait is a crossover between tradition and the contemporary that deliberately leaves the patina of time on view: unfinished surfaces, reclaimed materials, bespoke furniture paired with vintage pieces. An aesthetic of the palimpsest that finds an ideal setting in Florence.<\/p>\n

Since 2018 the studio, with the landscape designer Antonio Perazzi, has been developing the masterplan for Manifattura Tabacchi, sixteen buildings of the former factory turned into a new creative hub: a choice that favours the efficiency of existing buildings over demolition. q-bic also appears in our architecture selection; here it matters above all for its ability to give character to the city’s public interiors.<\/p>\n

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Genius Loci Architettura<\/h3>\n

With two offices, one in Milan and one in Florence on Via Mannelli, and a team of more than forty people led by three founders and two partners, Genius Loci Architettura<\/strong> works across architecture, interior design and planning for Italian and international clients: offices, hotels, residences, restorations, retail and even diplomatic premises. In the city it has signed two of the most visible transformations of recent years.<\/p>\n

The most conspicuous is W Florence, born from the renovation of the former Grand Hotel Majestic on Piazza dell’Unit\u00e0 d’Italia, opposite Santa Maria Novella station. The studio oversaw the transformation of the building and designed the guest room interiors, weaving contemporary Italian design with references to the building’s original modernist character; the project was covered by AD. At Manifattura Tabacchi, meanwhile, building B1, a rationalist warehouse from the 1950s with a brick base and dovetailed concrete beams, became the Aparto student residence between 2022 and 2025: 16,000 square metres and 395 rooms, with a concept called blue tobacco, inspired by the blue light that filtered through glass treated to protect the tobacco from the sun.<\/p>\n

Blue and tobacco tones, rendered in different finishes and materials, became the signature of the interiors and then of the identity of the place; the vegetation that grew during the years of abandonment was reinterpreted as the common thread of the shared spaces, and the building achieved LEED and WELL certification. A way of working with existing buildings that preserves the memory of a place and turns it into a narrative.<\/p>\n

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Simone Micheli Architectural Hero<\/h3>\n

Simone Micheli<\/strong>, who died on 28 December 2025, was one of the most recognisable figures in Italian interior design for hospitality. From his Florentine base he built a practice with offices in Milan, Dubai, Rabat and Busan and an instantly identifiable language: monochrome interiors, often white, multisensory, shot through with a playful streak and a strong narrative vocation. For more than twenty years his exhibitions at Milan’s Fuorisalone were a fixture for the contract world.<\/p>\n

Among his projects, a few kilometres from Florence, Maiano’s Tower in Fiesole, from 2017, brought a contemporary hospitality programme into a neo-Gothic tower; elsewhere, Aquatio Cave Luxury Hotel & Spa in Matera and Palazzo Gatto Art Hotel & Spa in Trapani show the same ability to engage with strong historic contexts without giving up an authorial mark.<\/p>\n

The Architectural Hero studio carries on the work and its communication: among the events of 2026 is Let’s Be Too.Gether<\/em>, at InOut The Hospitality Community in Rimini from 14 to 16 October. The studio also appears in our architecture selection; including it here means recognising how deeply its research has shaped the very idea of the hospitality interior.<\/p>\n

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Operatre Architettura<\/h3>\n

The studio is based on Via de’ Guicciardini, between Ponte Vecchio and Palazzo Pitti, and the location already says a great deal about its work. Lavinia Guicciardini Salini and Laura Innocenti<\/strong> mainly design homes inside Florence’s historic palazzi, seeking what they describe as a balance between existing architecture, contemporary taste and quality of living. They manage the project as a whole, from building permits and dealings with the Soprintendenza, the heritage authority, to art direction and bespoke furniture.<\/p>\n

FLO Home, on the top floor of a historic palazzo in the centre, is their most complete project: the old spiral staircase replaced by a light cantilevered stair, a mezzanine for the study, the kitchen rethought as the heart of the home, herringbone parquet, marble, sections of glass flooring and a panoramic terrace overlooking the Duomo. Furniture designed to the millimetre sits alongside vintage design pieces and antiques.<\/p>\n

Other projects include Atelier Casasola, the home and studio of the fashion designer Barbara Casasola in an apartment with seventeenth-century frescoes, published by Kinfolk, and a 1970s house rethought with the same care usually reserved for historic residences.<\/p>\n

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Erin Quinlan Quiros<\/h3>\n

With roots between Texas and Mexico, Erin Quinlan Quiros<\/strong> chose Florence as her base and made it the starting point for work that brings a cosmopolitan sensibility to the Tuscan countryside. Her family home, Casa Q in San Felice a Ema, created inside an eighteenth-century production building, became the manifesto of her approach: a double-height living room with exposed timber trusses, a central courtyard used as an open-air room, white walls, velvets and colourful works of art. The architectural renovation is by Luigi Fragola; the furnishings and atmosphere are hers.<\/p>\n

The house was published by AD, and AD Italia more recently returned to feature Cottage Q, a former farm storehouse in the hills around Florence turned into a retreat immersed in greenery, where Texan and Mexican culture converse with Tuscan tradition.<\/p>\n

Her portfolio also includes Villa Salina, on the Aeolian island, and a residence in New York’s Tribeca neighbourhood. Her presence in this selection reflects a precise phenomenon: Florence as an adopted home for international designers who reinterpret its domestic landscape with fresh eyes.<\/p>\n

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Prima Design<\/h3>\n

Born in London and raised between Spain, Milan and Florence by parents who restored houses, James Cavagnari<\/strong> founded Prima Design in the 1980s, experimenting with the most advanced design technologies of the time. International recognition came with luxury retail: in the 1990s the studio oversaw the visual design of more than two hundred Salvatore Ferragamo stores worldwide, and created one hundred and seventy installations for Bulgari.<\/p>\n

His most personal project is also the most recent. The James Suite Hotel Firenze 1564, completed in 2025, occupies the Renaissance palazzo in the centre where Cavagnari spent his childhood: fourteen keys, four signature suites named Florence, JC, Chaplin and Court, The James restaurant and the 1564 Mixology Lounge Bar, named after the year the palazzo was built. The project received a bronze at the IADA 2026 awards in the Hospitality category.<\/p>\n

Cavagnari describes himself as a director and a storyteller, and openly declares his distance from the monotony of neutral tones: colour, craftsmanship and materials meant to age well are the constants of a body of work that aims for longevity rather than trend.<\/p>\n

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Studio Ponsi<\/h3>\n

Based on Via della Fonderia, Studio Ponsi<\/strong> is led by Andrea and Luca Ponsi. Andrea Ponsi, architect, draughtsman and author, brings to the studio’s work an attention to perception and to the sensory dimension of space that can be recognised in both its buildings and its interiors: the home is read as a set of perceptual, sensory and material qualities even before it is a functional programme.<\/p>\n

The Maremma House in Magliano in Toscana, built between 2013 and 2015, was published in summer 2025 by AD Italia and Elle Decor Italia: rational volumes, essential lines and interiors built on light and on the relationship with the landscape. In the same register are the house on Lake Trasimeno, from 2021, and the House of the Four Horizons, featured by Design Milk in September 2026.<\/p>\n

The studio is included in the volume L’architettura in Toscana dal 1945 ad oggi<\/em> and pairs professional practice with artistic research that in 2026 also became a book, Face It. Ritratti al telefono<\/em>, presented alongside the exhibition Uno, nessuno e trentamila<\/em>. A figure who reminds us that, in Florence, drawing remains the tool with which space is conceived.<\/p>\n

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Tommaso Spadolini<\/h3>\n

Active in Florence since 1978, the studio of Tommaso Spadolini<\/strong> is one of the historic names of Italian yacht design and has spanned almost half a century of projects while keeping a recognisable line. Spadolini describes his approach as a timeless classic, one that does not renounce technology but puts it at the service of comfort within a clean, elegant design, always with the utmost respect for the sea and its culture.<\/p>\n

The portfolio includes yachts of every scale. Fortuna, 43 metres, delivered in 2000 to the Spanish royal family, and a 138 foot Baglietto designed for Roberto Cavalli in 2004 belong to the studio’s history; more recent projects include Aslec, a 45 metre yacht for Rossinavi, Crowbridge, a 42 metre yacht by Cantiere delle Marche from 2020, the Explorer 49.5 from 2021 and the refit of Solafide, completed in 2024.<\/p>\n

Alongside new builds, the studio brings the same care to the refit of historic boats, such as the revival of the ten metre Sangermani Scilla, where respect for nautical history guides every choice. This attitude makes Spadolini a natural presence in a Florentine selection: on board as well, the best design is the one that knows how to add without erasing.<\/p>\n

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Studio Benaim<\/h3>\n

Led by Andr\u00e9 Benaim<\/strong>, the studio works across restoration, renovation and interior design, in Tuscany and abroad, and has built a solid reputation precisely on its ability to bring historic buildings and apartments back into use without distorting them. If in our architecture selection its name is linked to the transformation of a historic cinema into a hybrid venue for books and screenings, here the focus is on the domestic scale, where the same rigour translates into everyday comfort.<\/p>\n

Casa Porta Romana, published by Interni in October 2025, is a clear example. In a 1930s apartment in the Oltrarno, designed for a leading American food and wine writer who has lived in Italy since the 1970s, the studio moved the bedrooms and studies to the street front and opened the living area towards the inner garden, removing a wall to create a single convivial space between sofa and dining table. The kitchen, less than ten square metres, has a ninety centimetre professional hob and granite worktops that continue as a shelf towards the dining room.<\/p>\n

The original terrazzo floors were preserved and restored, windows and doors salvaged by a joinery workshop, and the furniture made to measure. It proves that in Florence the quality of an interior often depends on what one chooses not to change.<\/p>\n

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F\u014dntego Architettura<\/h3>\n

Led by Francesco Busi<\/strong>, F\u014dntego Architettura works through subtraction and measure, focusing on structure, light and material rather than declarative effects. It is an approach that shows with particular clarity in its interiors, where every element must justify its presence.<\/p>\n

The project that brought the studio international attention is Fienile N, published by Dezeen in July 2025: a barn of 80 square metres in the Florentine countryside converted into a home. A system of mint green furniture, obtained by mixing all the greens of the surrounding vegetation, from the grey of the olive trees to the dark, brilliant green of the cypresses, acts as both storage and partition, gathering kitchen, storerooms and bathroom while leaving the original roof trusses exposed. The terracotta grilles of the windows reinterpret the mandolato, the traditional pierced brick infill of Tuscan barns.<\/p>\n

In Florence the studio designed Casa Scala, in the historic centre, with Sara Bucci. It also appears in our architecture selection, but it is precisely at the scale of the interior that its work reveals a rare precision.<\/p>\n

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Les\u00ecsse Design<\/h3>\n

The studio founded by the architect Giulia Adoni<\/strong>, based on Via Pippo Spano, has made its name by tackling small floor areas, measured budgets and apparently characterless contexts, where the project has to generate identity almost on its own.<\/p>\n

Bilo Blu, completed in 2025 in Sesto Fiorentino and published by Living, is the project that brought it to wider attention. An apartment of around one hundred square metres was divided into two units; in the one-bedroom flat on the first floor, blue becomes a narrative thread, a colour that evokes water, silence and distance but also intimacy. A bedroom with a small corner for remote working, generous storage and a living area with an open kitchen turn a suburban home into what the designer describes as a gentle bubble set apart from the city.<\/p>\n

Simple geometries, materials chosen to engage with natural light, economical yet intelligent solutions: Les\u00ecsse shows that the quality of an interior depends neither on scale nor on address, and that Florence’s metropolitan area can also produce projects capable of reaching the national magazines.<\/p>\n

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Officina Abitare<\/h3>\n

Founded in 2012 by Sara Bartolini and Matteo Pierattini<\/strong>, Officina Abitare defines itself as a sustainable design studio and brings this approach to its interiors: wellbeing, natural materials, energy efficiency and respect for context are part of the project from the outset, not a technical add-on.<\/p>\n

Una finestra sul Chianti, from 2022, is a good example of this method. In the hills of Impruneta, part of a farmhouse already recorded in the Leopoldine Cadastre and protected for its landscape value was divided into two apartments and upgraded in terms of energy performance. The interiors pair natural lime plaster, wooden floors and pietra serena details with contemporary resin surfaces; outside, a stone-paved courtyard showcases olive and oak trees.<\/p>\n

In Florence the studio redesigned an apartment overlooking the Boboli Gardens, published by Cose di Casa. Also included in our architecture selection, Officina Abitare represents a sensibility in growing demand: that of designers who consider sustainability a quality of the interior as well as of the building.<\/p>\n

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Interior design in Florence: the art of adding without erasing<\/h2>\n

Looking at these twenty studios together, the first impression is of a plural scene that refuses to be reduced to a single aesthetic. There is the Florence of narrative luxury, with its art-filled suites and hotels that have become international models; there is the Florence of the workshop, where the project begins at the carpenter’s bench and in the metalworker’s shop; there is nautical Florence, used to measuring every gesture to the millimetre; and there is a younger generation working on ordinary homes, real budgets and unpedigreed settings, while still bringing its projects to the magazines.<\/p>\n

And yet a common trait exists, and it concerns the way of standing within history. In Florence the interior is not invented from scratch: it is negotiated with what is already there. The evidence lies in frescoed vaults set against mirror-gloss green lacquer, a white sandstone pool created inside a nineteenth-century factory on the Arno, the green of olive trees and cypresses turned into colour for a barn, the terrazzo floors preserved in a 1930s apartment. Even when the contemporary mark is strong, the best Florentine interior design adds without erasing<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Perhaps this is the most relevant lesson the city offers Italian interior design today: at a time when reusing what already exists has become a necessity, Florence has practised it for centuries as a form of culture. The series continues with interior designers in Turin<\/a>, interior designers in Naples<\/a> and interior designers in Rome<\/a>, while for an overview of the leading names nationwide we recommend our guide to Italy’s most famous interior designers<\/a>. Studios wishing to submit a project to the editorial team or propose a collaboration can do so from our Advertising<\/a> page.<\/p>\n

Frequently asked questions about interior designers in Florence<\/h2>\n

How do you choose an interior designer in Florence?<\/h3>\n

It is worth starting from projects completed in settings similar to your own: working on an apartment in a historic palazzo in the centre, a villa in the hills or a 1950s house calls for different skills. It is useful to ask who will handle building permits and dealings with the authorities, which craftspeople regularly work with the studio and how the fee is structured across concept, detailed design, site supervision and furniture selection. If the designer is an architect, registration can be checked on the website of the Ordine degli Architetti di Firenze<\/a>, the professional order of architects for the Florence area.<\/p>\n

What is the difference between an architect and an interior designer?<\/h3>\n

An architect in Italy is registered with the professional Order and can sign the building applications needed to change the layout or structure of a property. An interior designer designs the interior space, furniture, materials, light and colour, and when the work requires building permits collaborates with a qualified professional. The profession is represented in Italy by associations such as AIPI, the Italian Association of Professional Interior Designers<\/a>, with which Archi&Interiors has an editorial partnership. Many of the studios in this selection combine both skill sets.<\/p>\n

Do you need permission to renovate a home in Florence’s historic centre?<\/h3>\n

It depends on the property and the type of work. If the building is protected under the Code of Cultural Heritage and Landscape<\/a>, the works require authorisation from the Soprintendenza, the state heritage authority; in any case, building work must be notified to the Comune, the city council, under the appropriate permit signed by a qualified professional. It is one of the reasons why, in Florence, a studio’s experience in dealing with heritage authorities counts as much as the quality of the design.<\/p>\n

Which Florentine studios work in luxury hospitality?<\/h3>\n

Among the names in this selection, Michele B\u00f6nan designed the Lungarno Collection hotels and the J.K. Place hotels, Luigi Fragola Architects the renovation of Belmond Villa San Michele in Fiesole, Genius Loci Architettura W Florence in the former Grand Hotel Majestic, Prima Design The James Suite Hotel Firenze 1564, Pierattelli Architetture YellowSquare and Firenze Number Nine, while Simone Micheli Architectural Hero worked on hotels throughout Italy. For more recent examples, our selection of the best hotel renovation projects of 2026<\/a> offers a wider overview.<\/p>\n