Rough Cut Scarpa
In 1957, Carlo Scarpa was asked to transform a narrow storefront under the arcades of Venice's Piazza San Marco into a showroom for Olivetti, the typewriter company. What he built became one of the most studied interiors of the twentieth century, and its floor is the reason this collection exists.
Scarpa laid the ground in small, irregular tiles of colored stone, each piece set slightly apart from the next, catching light like the staggered keys of the machines on display above them. The Rough Cut Scarpa collection draws directly from that geometry: an interlocking mosaic tile where every fragment holds its own edge, meeting its neighbors in the same restless, precise rhythm Scarpa used to make stone feel almost typographic.
This is a Carlo Scarpa inspired mosaic in the truest sense, not a reproduction, but a continuation of the logic behind the Negozio Olivetti floor. The rough-cut surface keeps the hand of the material visible, so the geometric marble mosaic tile reads as worked stone rather than polished uniformity. Colors shift subtly across the field, the way natural stone does when it's cut from real blocks instead of printed to match.
Use it where you'd want a floor to be noticed: an entry, a powder room, a shower niche, a backsplash tile that becomes the focal point of the room. As a designer luxury mosaic tile, the Scarpa collection tile rewards close looking the interlocking pattern reveals itself gradually, one piece at a time.
Most tile is chosen and forgotten. A Scarpa mosaic tile floor tends to be the thing people ask about.
