Vittoria Apuana, Forte dei Marmi, Italy — completed 2020 · 240 sqm above ground · 120 sqm basement · 1.000 sqm lot
A second home in Forte dei Marmi, designed for a family that wanted to be close to the sea but at a distance from the noise of the centre. The brief was specific: a modern, energy-efficient house, generous with light, where indoor and outdoor would extend into one another without interruption — and where the architecture would also serve as the backdrop for a private collection of contemporary art.
The house was conceived as an instrument: it had to host life, hold a collection, and frame a view of the Apuan Alps. Three things at once, without any of them taking precedence.
A site that asked for a different position
Vittoria Apuana sits north of the historic centre of Forte dei Marmi, close enough to walk to the services and the beach, far enough from the seasonal density that defines the town in summer. For a family that would use the house for long periods, the choice of this micro-context — rather than a more central plot — was the first design decision, made before any drawing.
A 1.000 sqm lot, paesaggistic constraint, and the same hidden adversary that defines almost every project on this coast: the water table, here at 80 cm from grade. Anything below ground had to be conceived as a watertight box, sealed against the water that surrounds it permanently.
A house that holds a collection
The client is a collector of contemporary art. The house was not designed as a gallery — it remains, fully, a home — but the architecture absorbs the collection into its language. Walls are dimensioned and proportioned for hanging. Surfaces are calm enough to disappear behind the work. Lighting follows museum-grade logic: track systems with directional fittings, calibrated to render colour faithfully and to leave rooms without visual noise when no work is on display.
The decision had architectural consequences. Walls had to be continuous and uninterrupted in the right places. Openings had to be controlled to avoid direct sunlight on hanging zones. Circulation had to allow a small group of guests to move through the living areas as one might move through a private exhibition — without ever feeling that the house had stopped being a house.
The canyon and the bridge
The brief asked for a separation between the two wings of the house — a subtle distance between the more public part of the residence and the private one — without isolating them. Most projects resolve this kind of programme with a corridor. Here it became a spatial event.
The entrance hall is a double-height void cut between the two wings, finished as fair-faced concrete. A continuous skylight runs along its full length, illuminating the volume from above. The effect, on entering, is unexpected: a narrow canyon of concrete — silent, vertical, lit only from the sky — opens before the visitor.
At the upper level, a glazed bridge crosses the canyon to connect the two wings. Steel structure, glass parapets, glass floor: visible, but barely. From the ground level, looking up, the bridge appears suspended in the daylight that pours down from the skylight. It is, structurally, the smallest possible gesture — and spatially, the largest.
A floating terrace
The image that most defines the house from the outside is a terrace that appears to float above the living area: a horizontal volume that hovers, two and a half metres beyond the ground floor below, without visible support and without any visible enclosure on its sides.
The Forte dei Marmi building regulation does not allow enclosed terraces — the perimeter of any external upper-level space must remain visually open. A literal reading of the rule produces ordinary balconies. A more attentive reading suggested another path.
The terrace is built as a sequence of independent cantilevered elements that intersect in plan but never touch each other physically. From most viewpoints — and certainly in any photograph — the terrace reads as a single, continuous volume. Up close, the gaps between the elements reveal the trick: each piece is a separate cantilever, and the regulation is satisfied. The volume that appears solid is, in fact, a carefully orchestrated set of separate pieces.
This is not a decorative invention. It is the kind of solution that emerges when constraints are taken seriously enough to be worked with, rather than worked against.
A staircase like an origami
The staircase rises from the ground floor to the roof through a glazed volume that detaches it from the rest of the house. Welded steel plates, painted white, folded into a single continuous form — closer to a sheet of paper bent into shape than to a conventional structure. The glazing that surrounds it on three sides removes any sense of mass: from the garden, from the living area, the staircase reads as a thin white form suspended in the air.
It is the second vertical element of the house, after the canyon. Where the canyon is heavy, contained, and cut into the ground, the staircase is light, exposed, and rises through the air. The two together describe the section of the house — one downward, one upward — and connect the basement, the living level, the upper rooms, and the roof terrace into a single architectural sequence.
The structure beneath
The transparency of the ground floor — continuous glazing on most of its perimeter, an open plan with no visible structural rhythm — depends on a structural strategy that is invisible from the inside. The house is built on a steel frame, conceived to reduce columns to a minimum and to liberate the floor plate of any constraint. Where a reinforced concrete structure would have demanded recurring columns and predetermined geometries, the steel frame allowed the ground floor to behave as a single continuous space.
The same structural choice made possible the cantilevers on the upper level — the floating terrace, the volumes that extend beyond the line of the lower walls. With concrete, those overhangs would have required visible counterweights or additional structure. With steel, they reduce to thin invisible profiles set inside the floor depth.
Below ground, the basement was conceived as a watertight white tank: a continuous monolithic cast, waterproofed against the water table at 80 cm from grade. None of this is visible in the finished house. All of it is what allows the finished house to be what it is.
Materials and light
The interior palette is restrained, calibrated to give the collection visual primacy. The ground floor is paved in teak parquet — warm, continuous, walked through rather than looked at. Outside, on the terrace and on the deck that wraps the garden, the floor moves to Navona travertine and teak boards, depending on use and exposure.
A technical volume divides the living area from the kitchen, holding the pantry and a service bathroom. Its corners are rounded, softening the geometry of the open plan, and its surfaces are clad in white-stained timber boards with an open-pore finish — the wood grain visible through the colour, the surface alive without being decorative. Glazed sliding panels disappear into the volume, allowing the kitchen to be visually separated from the living area when needed.
Teak boiserie returns elsewhere in the house in selected portions, paired with the white-stained boards as a quiet duet of warm and cool tones. The walls of the canyon are fair-faced concrete, untouched after casting. Lighting throughout is conceived in two layers: a calm ambient layer for daily life, and a precise gallery layer — track systems with directional fittings — for the moments when the house is asked to behave as an exhibition.
Outside and above
The garden is treated as a continuation of the interior, planted with species native to the Versilia coast: maritime pines (Pinus pinea), holm oaks (Quercus ilex), tamarisk (Tamarix gallica) along the windward edge, and lower vegetation chosen for its tolerance of salt and sun. The vegetation does not decorate the architecture — it negotiates with it, providing shade where the glazing is most exposed, and framing the views in the directions that matter.
The roof terrace, reached through the staircase, opens onto a horizon dominated by the Apuan Alps to the east — the marble mountains that gave the region its name and its identity. The terrace also hosts the photovoltaic array that powers the house, integrated into the roof geometry and invisible from below. The villa is rated A+, with the technical decisions — high-efficiency heat pumps, solar generation, controlled mechanical ventilation, deep envelope insulation — concealed within the architecture rather than displayed.
The villa today
The house is lived in. The collection has settled into the spaces designed for it. The terrace that floats has not stopped looking like a terrace that floats. The canyon and the bridge work together as the family moves between the wings — quietly, several times a day — without anyone ever announcing them as architectural devices.
What is most satisfying, looking at the house now, is what is not visible: the steel frame holding the open plan, the white tank below ground, the cantilevered elements that satisfy a regulation while pretending to be a single volume, the calibration of the lighting that disappears when the rooms are empty. The house works because of these things. It feels effortless because of them.
A residence, a private collection, a viewpoint on the mountains. Three programmes that could have produced three different houses. They produced one.
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