Weighted blanket

Studio Ossidiana explores feathering future nests with new forms of covering

- ROSA BERTOLI

Widely endorsed by the medical community as a tool for aiding sleep and encouraging relaxation among people with autism and ADHD, weighted blankets have become increasingly popular for their purported therapeutic effects. Keen to explore this further and create our own version, we called upon the Rotterdam-based Studio Ossidiana, founded in 2015 by Giovanni Bellotti and Alessandra Covini. Working across multiple scales, they like to blur the boundary between architecture, design and art, ‘focusing on the materiality of things, but bearing in mind the larger narratives, politics and geographies they reflect’. Their projects create alternative worlds through multisensory landscapes, as seen in a recent playground for a school in Utrecht, or their multiple habitats for birds.

Bellotti and Covini started researching weighted blankets, becoming particularly interested in their possible role helping with insomnia and reducing stress. ‘At the same time, we began to think of the blanket as a sort of nomadic house, a thing of comfort you can carry with you,’ says Bellotti.