Forte dei Marmi, Italy — completed 2016 · 240 sqm above ground · 120 sqm basement
A demolition and reconstruction on a small lot a short distance from the sea, designed for a family seeking a second home for summers and long weekends. The brief was straightforward in intention but demanding in detail: a residence that would feel both calm and elegant — clear volumes, abundant natural light, refined materials, and a wellness space designed to be lived in, not displayed.
What made this project particular was not the brief itself, but everything that the site decided in advance.
A site that defined the rules
The lot was modest. Forte dei Marmi has strict urban regulations and a paesaggistic constraint that limits volumes and heights, and the proximity of the sea added a second, less visible boundary: the water table. Anything built below ground had to negotiate with the sea before it could begin negotiating with the architecture.
This is the kind of context that, if approached as a list of obstacles, produces compromise. Approached as a starting point, it produces a project. Each constraint was treated not as something to overcome, but as a parameter that — once accepted — would clarify the design rather than weaken it.
The first decision was structural in every sense. The basement, intended to hold the wellness area and a generous service space, would sit at minus 3.5 metres from grade — roughly 2.5 metres below the natural water table. To make this possible, the construction phase required a temporary depression of the water table through a well-point system, and the final building was conceived as a watertight box: a double-membrane waterproofing system around a perimeter cavity 80 cm wide, ventilated and continuous on all four sides, separating the basement walls from the surrounding earth and water. Not visible in the finished house. Decisive for everything that follows.
The garden draws on what the Versilia coast has always offered: cork oaks (Quercus suber) and holm oaks (Quercus ilex), the species that define the natural pine-and-oak landscape inland from the beach. The villa was designed to sit within this vegetation, not against it.
The wellness area, redesigned by a constraint
The original brief included a swimming pool. The lot did not allow it.
Rather than abandon the idea or compress it into something unsatisfying, the project redirected it. A compact hydromassage pool — closer in scale to a generous spa than to a traditional pool — was placed outside, set against the southern wall of the house. From the basement wellness room behind that wall, a single underwater window opens laterally into the pool.
The effect, on a sunny day, is the opposite of what one expects from an underground space. Light filters through the water and projects the moving caustics of the surface onto the ceiling of the spa, slowly, continuously. The room is below ground but reads as illuminated from the outside. The constraint that prevented a pool became the device that gave the wellness area its quality.
The wellness space contains a sauna, a hammam, a shower, and an internal jacuzzi. The floor is in Eramosa marble, chocolate variant, cut against the grain and finished in waterjet — the horizontal veining intensified, the surface absorbing rather than reflecting. The jacuzzi is wrapped by a dark-stained oak boiserie: a contained, atmospheric volume within the larger room. The contrast with the teak that runs through the rest of the villa is deliberate.
A staircase that changes weight
The villa develops across four levels — basement, ground floor, first floor, roof terrace — and the staircase is the element that makes them feel like a single space rather than a sequence of rooms.
It begins, in the basement, as something solid. The treads are in Navona travertine, cantilevered from the wall — the same travertine that paves the ground floor, so the staircase reads as a material continuation of the upper level descending below, rather than a separate object. Moving upward, the structure becomes lighter, more open. At the top, a sliding skylight gives access to the roof terrace, aligning the interior staircase with the open sky in a single vertical movement.
The installation of the cantilevered treads was, in itself, one of the most precise moments of the construction phase. Each step had to be set with a level of tolerance closer to that of furniture than to that of a building.
The installation of the cantilevered treads was, in itself, one of the most precise moments of the construction phase. Each step had to be set with a level of tolerance closer to that of furniture than to that of a building.
Materials and light
The volumes of the villa are deliberately net. Clean edges, controlled openings, no superfluous gestures. The exterior is finished in white plaster, with two corners clad in vertical teak boards — an accent that softens the geometry and connects the house to the pine-and-oak landscape of the Versilia coast. Outdoor flooring in teak deck wraps around the hydromassage pool and extends toward the garden.
Inside, the ground floor is paved in Navona travertine. The first floor moves to teak parquet, laid in a custom pattern designed for this project. Walls in gypsum-based plaster, slightly absorbent, calibrated to daylight rather than to a fixed white.
Teak boiserie returns in selected portions of both floors, never as decoration. On the ground floor it wraps the technical core of the house — service rooms, storage — concealing the functional life within a continuous material plane. On the first floor it lines the staircase volume and integrates the bedroom doors, which read as part of the wood surface rather than as interruptions of it.
The roof terrace
The roof terrace is the highest point of the house and the only one with a direct view of the sea. Reached through the sliding skylight, it is treated as an outdoor room rather than a residual surface. Planters with Feijoa sellowiana and dwarf Pittosporum tobira — evergreen, salt-resistant, restrained — define areas without dividing them. The same logic applied below to the architecture is applied here to the planting: choose what is appropriate to the place, edit the rest.
A collaborative process
The relationship with the client was, throughout, a real collaboration. He participated actively in the decision-making process, supported by his son — at the time a student of architecture. Two viewpoints: one rooted in how the family would actually live in the house, the other engaged with the discipline itself. Working with a client who is interested in the design is an advantage. The decisions are tested before they are made, and the resistance to compromises that weaken the project is shared rather than imposed.
Clarity in design is rarely the result of a single strong idea. It is more often the result of many small decisions made together, in the right order.
The villa today
The house was lived in for nearly a decade. Last year, the property was sold — a villa designed for a specific family found its second life with a new owner. Which is the most honest measure of a project’s quality: that it works not only for those who commissioned it, but for those who arrive after.
What does not show in the photographs is the foundation work, the membranes, the well-point system, the months spent preparing for what is now invisible. The most visible quality is the simplicity of the result. The most important quality is everything that holds it up.
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