Forte dei Marmi Residence

A penthouse near the sea at Forte dei Marmi, with a roof terrace as large as the flat beneath it, worked on one room at a time rather than all at once: the living room and its veranda, the master bedroom and bathroom, a study that doubles as a games room, and then the roof.

The owners asked, with some irony, for a cure for what they called their design deficit: a house with more exuberance in it, that still held together. So everything began with the materials, chosen at the source and worked with precision, and with white Carrara marble as the thread through the rooms, changing its texture from one to the next to give the house a rhythm.

Three of the rooms arrived with something awkward already in them. A structural column stood in the middle of what was to become the open-plan living room. The master bedroom was too small to take a headboard of normal depth. And the veranda was total white — a room with a sea view and nothing in it to hold the eye.

None of the three was solved by buying something. The column is now held inside a screen of vertical and horizontal wooden slats, designed and made to measure, which divides the entrance from the living room semi-transparently and takes the column into the architecture rather than apologising for it.

The headboard was drawn to the room instead of the room to the headboard — fully usable at the depth the space allowed. And the veranda floor was resined in a blue taken from the sea outside it, set against the Fornasetti wallpaper and a wool carpet made to order at double thickness.