Desig House: At Home: A Sculptor's Tuscan Monastery

In a former monastery on a hilltop in southern Tuscany, the residence and studio of British sculptor Emily Young is the ideal setting for her stone carved heads and figures, each telling a story of their own

As night falls at the Convento di Santa Croce in southern Tuscany, gleaming white fireflies burst into light. One by one, they gather in the walled garden crackling and sparkling in furious competition with the plump, silver moon above.

It is as if the sculptor, Emily Young, has orchestrated this celestial ensemble specially for our arrival - a demonstration fitting of her work. Emily carves in marble, onyx, alabaster, and lapis lazuli, creating dramatic stone personifications of ancient earth and nature. She hammers, chisels and grinds away at pieces of rock, creating monumental works that celebrate the material they are carved from. She delights in the faults, veins and splits in her material and relishes the play of wind, water and temperature on their craggy surfaces.

'There is a story told in every piece of stone that is more magnificent than any creation myth, so when I carve into the stone I'm imposing my own tiny moment on it, I put a little modern consciousness back into nature,' she says. Handsome, aquiline noses and high, straight foreheads emerge from stone; each is imbued with its own identity as determined by the stone's geological history and geographical source - be it the Dolomitic limestone found at a quarry nearby, or the rich royal blue of Brazilian sodalite, formed when molten rock cools very slowly deep within the earth.

Though faces are evident, ragged flanks of rock are left untouched, revealing nature's own hand alongside Emily's. It is as if the human form is slowly evolving, buffed, polished and ready to go - return to these sculptures in several thousand years and perhaps a fleet of fully formed figures will have materialised. The effect is similar to Michelangelo's Prigioni at the Accademia Gallery in Florence; musuclar marble men appear to wrench themselves free from the stone they are carved from.

Though she always had an interest in drawing and painting, it was by chance that Emily became a sculptor in her thirties. 'I had some slabs of marble left over from a kitchen work surface, and somebody had left a little mason's kit with a hammer and some chisels, I put the two together and loved it.'

She is a product of her family's glamorous brand of bohemia. Her grandmother Kathleen Scott, widow of the Antarctic explorer Captain Robert Falcon Scott, was a sculptor in her own right, and a friend of Rodin. Her father was the writer and politician Wayland Young, who would take his daughter for long walks to see ancient stone circles of Avebury and Stonehenge. And the sight of a 15-year-old Emily dancing in a Notting Hill nightclub so captivated Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd that he immortalised her in the psychedelic record 'See Emily Play'.

Aged 17, Emily packed her bag and left her family home in London's Bayswater to begin her travels to India: 'I stopped in Afghanistan for a long time - it was biblical, so beautiful and tough - and in Iran, where the landscape was also wild and untouched.' Influences from this cross-continental adventure can be traced in the faces she carves - their androgynous, elegant contours and simplicity of form feel utterly archaic.

Five years ago, Emily left London again. This time for good, setting up her home and studio at the Convento di Santa Croce, an imposing golden block of a building, flanked by lofty Cyprus trees. It is a seventeenth-century monastery that overlooks the hilltop town of Batignano and was originally built to accommodate 21 friars.

The monastery has since undergone several incarnations. It was closed by Napoleonic decree in 1805 and in the wake of the French invasion, an entrepreneurial Frenchman turned it into a glass factory (according to village lore his son was later murdered in a wage dispute). Soon after it became an agricultural estate and for a century was left to its own devices, but by 1968, much of the building had been reduced to rubble. It was at this point that interior designer Adam Pollock decided to leave London, where he'd been a mainstay of the Swinging Sixties party circuit. He found refuge at Santa Croce, and gradually restored parts of the monastery back to its former glory.

In 2011, Emily began renting from Adam, and when he decided to permanently return to the UK in 2013, she bought the property from him. The faded noble setting couldn't be better suited to her work. A beautiful, pearlescent onyx disc marks your arrival. It stands, like a vast planet, in the remaining arch of the church's apse, now painted a striking ultramarine blue. Emily sculpts largely outside, overlooking Mount Amiata to the east, with an indoor workshop at the back of the building for finer work.

Though she does not prescribe to a particular religion - 'I can be a Buddhist, a Hindu, or a Christian, all before breakfast' - her work is certainly at home in sacred spaces. She has made pieces for Salisbury Cathedral, the garden of St Pancras Church and now, for the second time, her sculptures are on show in the Cloister of Madonna dell'Orto in Venice, coinciding with the fifty-sixth Venice Biennale, where it adds a much-needed dose of gravity to the glitzy whirligig. A small slice of quiet among the madness and a reminder to stop and think just for a moment.