Villa Serenoa

The client had owned the site for eleven years before engaging Orenda. They knew exactly where the house should sit, which trees were to remain, and how the morning light moved across the terrace in each season. Our role was not to design a vision but to give precise architectural form to one that already existed entirely in the client's imagination.

Positioned on a gentle promontory above the Gulf of Poets near Lerici, the villa is oriented to capture both the morning light off the water and the evening silhouette of the Apuan Alps to the north. The plan follows a loose L-shape that allows every principal room to hold two aspects simultaneously—never a single view, always a relationship between two.

The material palette was driven by the colours already present in the landscape: the silver-green of the olive groves, the warm ochre of the cliff face, the dense grey-blue of the sea at dusk. We introduced Leccese stone for all external surfaces and terraces, bleached linen-finish oak for the interiors, and a hand-applied silicate paint in a single muted tone across all internal walls.

All outdoor furniture, pergola structures, and ambient lighting were custom-designed for the site by our atelier, ensuring that the boundary between the interior and the terraced gardens remained as dissolved as the landscape itself demanded.

The villa does not announce itself. It simply appears, as though it grew there over a very long time. Which was, from the very first conversation, exactly what was asked of us.