In the Reggio approach, the environment is considered the third teacher: this awareness, which is also strong in the Totem culture, guided the choices during the complete renovation of the nursery school spaces in the summer of 2025.

For this project, we chose Play+, a design studio with extensive experience in children’s services in the Reggio Emilia tradition. Maurizio Fontanili and Sebastiano Longaretti from Play+ watched how the children used the spaces, listened to the collective and the educator, and came up with ideas that turned architectural constraints into resources and educational opportunities.

The result is a school that has been renovated in terms of systems, floors and furnishings, but above all in terms of spaces: more flexible, more open, designed to be modified by children and together with them, in response to their research and their languages. The atelier has become a large and connective place, where the projects of all the sections meet, feed each other and take shape.

The choice of furnishings in the different sections has been carefully considered with the children’s age and beauty as an educational dimension in mind: because the aesthetic quality of the environments is not a detail, but a condition that nurtures curiosity, a sense of belonging, and the enjoyment of being at school.