Exteriors & gardens

The GuestHouse stands among tall cypresses on the hills of Sasso Marconi, across the park from Il Fienile. The work was all inside: from the lawn, the house looks as it always has.

The terrace covers 140 m² among the rooftops of the Oltrarno. I designed a series of outdoor planters for it, made by hand by Massimo Cecconi in rusted copper on stainless-steel frames, and studied their arrangement as carefully as their shape: long planters of dense green along the edges give the terrace its privacy, round ones carry small trees.

The roof was finished after the flat below it, and took longer. Every planter on it is corten steel made to measure, and the three elemental sculptures along the loggia — two of fire, one of water — needed a great deal of preparation before anything could be installed.

A covered colonnade along one edge of the roof, glazed out to the pine canopy and the mountains.

A timber pergola along the flank of the house, grown over with vines, holding a long table at one end and a daybed at the other. Furniture and lighting were chosen to sit under the leaves and be forgotten; the valley is what anyone sitting here is looking at.

Furniture for the pool area kept minimal and unintrusive, so as not to compete with the view. A round corten table was designed around a tree that was already there.

The house sits above its own terraces, with the barn below it and the pool below that. The forecourt, the basin, the box hedging and the cypresses were all here already; what these photographs record is the setting the rest of the work had to answer to.

From the air the terrace reads as a plan: the pergola, the spa, the ring of planters, the loggia along one edge — set among the roofs of Forte dei Marmi, sea on one side, Apuan Alps on the other.

A small terrace off the living room: a table for two, stone underfoot, and the Duomo directly ahead over the Uffizi arcade. The shortest distance in the apartment between a chair and the whole of Florence.

Il Fienile stands among cypresses in a wooded valley in the hills of Sasso Marconi, facing the GuestHouse across the park.

Wicker furniture, soft light, and outdoor vases designed and made to measure in oxidised copper.

From the air the apartment stops being a set of rooms and becomes a position: a terrace cut into the tiles a few hundred metres from Ponte Vecchio, the Uffizi below, the Duomo over the ridge.