The Florentine Atelier Redefining Handcrafted Design

Il Pezzo Mancante (“the Missing Piece” in English) is an atelier that handcrafts unique and elegant pieces using solid wood, brass, mouth-blown crystal, and marble from the finest Carrara quarries. With these materials, the Florence-born Cosimo Terzani and Barbara Bertocci translate into exquisite objects their love of superior quality and timeless design.

Your name suggests an idea of completion and searching. How does "the missing piece" come to life within your creative process?

The world is already full of wonderful objects. We don’t believe there is any real need to add new ones every year, simply to give free rein to our creativity. That is why a piece of ours is born only when there is an authentic desire: to add value, to fulfill a function, to move someone.

Every piece carries with it the promise we make to those who choose us — that it will truly serve the purpose they need, and that, precisely for that reason, it may remain in their life for a long time, perhaps even for generations. Every piece is its own thing, shaped with its own dedication, conceived for that particular person.

For us, the “missing piece” is not the object that simply fills a void. It is the one that was truly missing from a home, from the people who live there — sometimes from ourselves, even before we realized it. Until that desire is present, we prefer not to add anything at all.

Many of your works carry a strong sculptural quality. How important is the boundary between functional object and work of art to you?

For us, that boundary simply does not exist. An object must perform its function — but it must do so with feeling. The two are inseparable: if function were to betray emotion, or emotion were to betray function, the result would no longer be a design object in our eyes.

What interests us is that, from the moment it comes into being, the object becomes a vessel for memory. It holds within it the memory of those who conceived and built it — the hands and the devotion that gave it form. And it continues to gather more, accompanying the life of whoever chooses it and keeping their memories safe across time. It is in this, if we truly must put it into words, that the sculptural dimension and the function become one and the same.

Your creations often seem to tell a story suspended in time. How do you build this narrative dimension into design?

For us, being suspended in time is the ambition of being timeless.

History holds an immense fascination for us, and we respect it — because we grew up inside it, and we have no wish to erase it. This is where we feel distant from a certain strain of modernism: the kind that sometimes confused coldness with purity, losing the warmth that allows things to survive across time. We prefer to love history and carry it forward with us.

The narrative dimension grows from this — from a respect for what came before us, and from the desire to make objects that will still speak, a hundred years from now.