Design by the sea: coastal-living-inspired solutions by Cotto d’Este

The laid-back elegance of coastal villages, the comfort of peaceful environments, the constant feeling of being on vacation: this is what it’s like to live in a Mediterranean-inspired home. This unmistakable and timeless style, with ancient origins, has, over the centuries, been influenced by the traditions of the countries that border the Mediterranean Sea, from Spain and Italy to Greece and Morocco, boasting a combination of textures, colours, and furniture that recalls summer. This sophisticated design, evoking a luxurious, yet simple and serene lifestyle, is the product of a strong connection with nature and a rejection of unnecessary extravagance or frills.

A perfect balance between aesthetics and functionality, creating a peaceful oasis that’s beautiful to see and delightful to live in.

One of the key elements in defining this style is colour: a palette of neutral tones, like white, sand, and light grey, form the basis for integrating and alternating marine shades, like deep ocean blue, sea green, turquoise, and sky blue. Textures also play a fundamental role: sophisticated finishes featuring natural materials like wood and stone are perfect for creating environments that reflect the beauty of the surrounding natural context and, together with architectural details, enhancing the design experience. The spaces are, in fact, defined by clean and simple lines, often minimalist, yet well-defined, and characterised by large windows that exalt natural light and frame the coastal landscape, creating a seamless flow between exterior and interior spaces and inviting the surrounding beauty into the home. To keep this aesthetic fresh and authentic, in recent years there has been a growing emphasis on personalisation and innovation.

Cotto d’Este’s porcelain stoneware surfaces give designers and architects the chance to create an atmosphere inspired by the coastal landscape, with versatile, innovative, and prestigious solutions. Thirty years of expertise have allowed Cotto d’Este to develop unique, high quality collections, known for their aesthetic and technical excellence, incredible beauty, and fine details. Cotto d’Este’s surfaces can be used for floors, wall cladding, worktops, and even furniture, contributing to the creation of a sophisticated and tailor-made look. In particular, the ultra-thin Kerlite slabs (3.5mm and 6.5mm thick) are lightweight and durable, perfect for cladding interior spaces and establishing aesthetic continuity with the outside landscape by reproducing natural elements through looks, textures, and decorative details.

Pura is a ceramic collection that mimics and exalts the look of limestone, one of the most seductive and versatile stones in the world, renowned for its incomparable elegance. It accentuates the stone’s typical features, blending them in a unique and harmonious way and creating a well-balanced texture that is both mineral and tactile. Pura is the ceramic response to the demand for a technically and aesthetically high-performance cladding product, offering both indoor and outdoor solutions. In fact, the 14mm-thick slabs offer a singularly compact surface that’s incredibly resistant to impact, scratches, dirt, and chemicals, while the 20mm-thick slabs are specifically designed for exterior flooring. The innovative production process and the fibreglass mesh applied to the underside of the 6.5mm-thick, ultra-thin Kerlite Plus slabs ensure surfaces of extraordinary durability that are not only extremely versatile, but also 100% Carbon Neutral.

Thanks to these characteristics, as well as the performances of the 14mm and 20mm-thick versions, Pura was included in the 2023 ADI Design Index and won the Archiproducts Design Award for Sustainability for its commitment to reducing the pollution it generates as well as its carbon footprint via a careful production process and the THINk ZERO project, through which all residual CO₂ emissions, calculated throughout the slabs’ entire lifecycle, are entirely offset.

Advantage Skin is a new stone-look product that combines some of the most evocative mineral textures found in nature. Its ultra-thin format makes it a truly universal cladding material: a lightweight, flexible, and highly resistant ceramic covering for an infinite number of applications. The collection’s remarkable material and aesthetic balance extends to volumes, furnishings, curved walls, and any other expression of distinctive architectural originality that only Kerlite 3plus can deliver. In fact, these exclusive ultra-thin Kerlite 3plus slabs are both lightweight and durable, offering the perfect combination of technological performance, extreme ease of installation, and unparalleled aesthetic quality. Furthermore, they are sustainable, thanks to the reduced use of materials during production and the THINk ZERO project, which fully offsets their CO₂ emissions, calculated throughout the product’s entire lifecycle. Advantage Skin is also part of the PROTECT® line, which offers extremely high performance and antibacterial flooring and cladding, guaranteeing a healthy, safe, and protected environment for worry-free living.

Its compatibility with Blustyle's Advantage collection further increases its design versatility. Easily paired and perfectly complementary, the two surfaces offer seamless stylistic continuity for any application, whether indoors or outdoors.

Wonderwall is an exclusive project by Cotto d’Este featuring motifs that are usually found on wallpaper. This collection allows individuals to express their personality through decorations that play with perspective and make walls stand out with a combination of colours and graphics The collection comes in 19 wonderful decorations, with deep textures and elegant designs, printed in the highest definition. These over-sized, ultra-thin Kerlite slabs, measuring 100x300 cm and reinforced with fibreglass, are thin and lightweight, yet remarkably durable, perfect for interior design projects that seek to create a unique and prestigious environment within architectural spaces.