Elena Pinna refers to herself as an art designer. Though true in part, this doesn’t tell the whole story. Of Sardinian origins, from an early age on she was enthusiastic about design arts, in keeping with a family tradition stretching back generations of involvement in high-quality décor. She studied at an art college, following the craft and material-based traditions of her region linked to wood, cork and weaving on old manually-operated wooden embroidery looms. Then, after moving to Florence, she attended the courses organised by Polimoda, specialising in the design of fabrics.

In her creations, which always follow the family tradition, she likes to start out with a raw material, usually solid wood, which has just been sawn and worked in the same way as for tables processed according to old craft traditions, not planed or smoothed down so as to bring out its rough tactile texture (chestnut, fir or perfumed and ‘sacred’ cypress) or recycled wood, of a considerable thickness, worked ‘roughly’ and by hand in the ‘time-honoured manner’, on which she extends chromatic strata akin to snippets of lace and other natural elements (olive and rosemary twigs, melted bee wax, leaves, berries and pearls), all of which are associated with the fragrances and the light of Mediterranean scrub, giving rise to unique and peerless works of art.