Villa Glass House

A luxury home set in the beautiful surroundings of an equally select location: Villa Glass House in Forte dei Marmi is an anthem to minimalism with its precise, right-angled forms, its brightly colored surfaces, and its large windows.

Location Forte dei Marmi, Italy
Year 2022
Designer ARCHITECT Antonio Tanzini
Applications Furnishing elements, Wall cladding
Project Type Private House

A residential gem in one of Tuscany’s most glamorous resorts

Forte dei Marmi is one of the most famous, exclusive seaside resorts in Tuscany. Splendid gardens, vegetable plots and lawns alternate with luxurious villas set in lush grounds.

Overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea and surrounded by a beach of the finest golden sand, the town is like a jewel set between the coast and the Apuan Alps, where Michelangelo once came to choose the finest blocks of marble.

This is the setting for Villa Glass House, a residential project by architect Antonio Tanzini: it is a large, detached mansion with modern, functional interiors and large floor-to-ceiling windows that create an enticing dialogue between indoors and outdoors, man and nature.

With forms inspired by the great Rationalist masters Mies van der Rohe and Richard Neutra, Villa Glass House features constantly changing, fragmented perspectives, with asymmetry the dominant characteristic. The living area forms the largest block within the complex, while the sleeping area consists of a series of rectangular clusters that make up five suites, with the master suite on the mezzanine floor. Both zones overlook a large swimming pool that consists of a sunbathing beach and a deeper area suitable for swimming. A bridge leads to the main entrance on the shore side.

The brightness of Calce Avorio, the warm embrace of Fokos Rena

For the cladding of the swimming pool and its surroundings, Antonio Tanzini selected the outstanding looks and performance of Laminam large slabs. The Avorio shade from the Calce collection was chosen as the solution with color and texture most similar to travertine, the project’s dominant natural stone. With Avorio, Calce surpasses the purity of the snowiest white, with an exquisite combination of a cool, homely “feel” and a warm, cozy sensation. When choosing it to line the pool, the architect also considered how it would look with the pool full of water, when the effect would be darker than when it was empty. These variations are also influenced by the light: the colors generated by natural daylight on water constantly change depending on the time of day, the weather and the time of year, while the effects of artificial light, which is more static, vary with the color temperature of the light itself – white if cold, yellow if warmer.

The special brightness of Calce Avorio reflects all light conditions in a completely neutral manner, a factor which also enables it to integrate easily into its natural surroundings.

The snowy purity of Calce Avorio reappears in the seven bathrooms, combined with the Rena color from the Fokos collection used for the countertops.

Fokos is inspired by the primordial elements of nature: stone, sand, lead, earth and salt. Beige, the underlying shade of all colors in the series, appears in its variants to offer warm hues for interior design. Rena is the most relaxing color in the entire assortment, a shade instinctively associated with the soft sand of a sunny beach. Its velvety surface adds a warm hue to interior design schemes, evoking a mood of coziness and security. Combined with Calce Avorio, it fully achieves the fundamental aesthetic aims of this project, which uses color to give the building an overall figurative abstraction. The light shades of Laminam’s Calce Avorio and Fokos Rena bestow an even more intangible, minimalist quality on the building’s already simple forms, stripping the villa of any superfluous decorative frills.