Four Studios Weave a Ligurian Villa into the Cliff That Survived the Bombing of Recco

On November 10, 1943, twenty-two British bombers leveled the Ligurian town of Recco. Almost nothing survived. The eastern promontory above Baia dei Frati was one of the few fragments that did, its terraced gardens, maritime pines, and pre-war topography still legible decades later. It is on this loaded piece of ground that Gosplan, Giordano Hadamik Architects, caarpa, and studio.skey have delivered a 750 m² villa that treats landscape not as backdrop but as the project's primary material.

What makes the project genuinely interesting is the degree to which four independent practices, each with a different disciplinary accent, fused their work into a single continuous spatial system. Architecture, garden, and interior design are not layered on top of one another; they are the same gesture. A ground plane of Botticino marble runs without interruption from living room floors to exterior terraces to the edge of a disappearing pool that can convert into a walkable surface. The further you move from the building, the rougher the material becomes: local split stone replaces marble, and cultivated garden gives way to the existing Mediterranean slope. The hierarchy is legible, tactile, and never arbitrary.

Reading the Promontory

Seen from the air, the site reads as a narrow finger of rock jutting into turquoise water, with the village climbing the hills behind it. The original property was a patchwork of volumes in clashing styles, accumulated over decades without a clear plan. The design team's first move, begun in January 2020, was to strip that patchwork back and re-read the original terraced garden as a framework. The curved stone staircase descending toward the coastline traces the natural slope rather than imposing a new geometry on it.

The result is a building that does not sit on its site so much as participate in it. Umbrella pines, olive trees, and agricultural patterns that predate the war are treated as structural elements of the composition. Swimmers in the cove below experience the villa as part of the cliff, not a house perched on top of one.

Timber Canopy and the Threshold Condition

The timber pergola is the villa's most visible architectural device. It projects from the garden facade as a deep canopy, casting striped shadows across stone pavers and lounge furniture. But it is doing more than providing shade. Every room in the house is conceived as a threshold: a point where interior crosses into exterior, where openness negotiates with seclusion. The pergola makes that negotiation physical. Under it, you are neither inside nor outside; you are in a condition that belongs entirely to the Mediterranean tradition of the loggia, updated with clean lines and restrained detailing.

Arched doorways compound the effect. Rather than flat openings, the arches frame specific views of the coastline, turning each passage through the house into a composed sequence. The covered terrace with its arched opening and timber slat ceiling is the villa's most generous room, and it has no walls.

The Spiral Core

The helical staircase is the vertical spine of the house. Its pale stone treads and timber slat columns appear in the entry hall, where it is flanked by slatted wood cabinetry that frames a view straight through to the trees outside. This is not a grand staircase in the palazzo sense; it is compact, almost intimate, winding upward through light filtered by vertical timber elements.

A second floating timber staircase, with open risers against a white plaster wall, provides a quieter connection between levels. The contrast is deliberate. One stair is sculptural and social, the other functional and private. Together they allow the split-level volumes, which step down the hillside in section, to feel connected without collapsing into a single open volume.

Interior Warmth Without Excess

The interiors, developed across all four studios, demonstrate a rare discipline. Vertical timber slats recur as a motif: framing alcoves, filtering light, creating depth in walls that might otherwise read as flat. The living room uses full-height glazing to dissolve the boundary with the terrace, but the timber paneling and recessed seating alcove pull you back into a sense of enclosure. It is a room that works equally well in a summer storm and a January afternoon.

The dining room is warmer and more contained. A dark timber table sits beneath a paper globe pendant, catching morning sunlight that rakes across the floor. Elsewhere, a travertine table with a spherical vase and dried branches sits under a curved plaster ceiling, a quiet vignette that reveals the team's attention to material resonance. Natural lime on walls, oak on floors, Botticino marble on thresholds: the palette is tight, regional, and never showy.

Private Rooms and Measured Light

Bedrooms and bathrooms are handled with the same threshold logic as the public spaces, just at a lower register. An arched doorway with a stepped threshold leads into a bedroom where the pale stone floor continues from the corridor, maintaining material continuity even as the spatial character shifts. The built-in oak desk beside a window overlooking coastal hills is a detail that suggests someone actually designed these rooms for inhabitation, not for a photoshoot.

A freestanding tub framed by a doorway and a raw timber stool; a bedside nightstand with floor-length curtains in soft morning light: these are spaces that earn their quietness through proportion and restraint rather than minimalist posturing. The curved plaster ceilings in several rooms soften the geometry and catch indirect light in ways that flat planes cannot.

The Disappearing Pool and Material Gradient

The disappearing pool, which can convert into a continuous walkable surface, is the landscape design's most technically ambitious element. When covered, the Botticino marble extends unbroken from the living room floor to the cliff's edge. When open, the water surface picks up reflections of pine canopy and sky. It is a trick, but a good one: it multiplies the terrace area without compromising the pool, and it reinforces the project's central idea that ground is continuous, not partitioned.

The material gradient from marble to split stone is best understood at the garden level. Near the house, everything is precise: pale paving, clipped edges, a rectangular pool channel aligned with the horizon. Move uphill and the surfaces roughen. An outdoor timber dining table sits on stone paving beneath olive trees, and the sloping lawn with fruit trees reads as agricultural rather than ornamental. The 4,500 m² park unfolds through terraces and winding paths that follow the natural slope, connecting the villa to a coastline that retains traces of its pre-war character.

Terraced Garden as Framework

The garden is not an afterthought. From the outset, landscape was the guiding framework: the design drew on the original layout of the terraced garden, local topography, and Mediterranean vegetation to establish the project's spatial logic. The olive and fruit trees climbing the slope, the mature pines leaning over the infinity pool, the glass balustrade that allows the view to pass uninterrupted from bedroom to sea: all of these are consequences of a landscape-first methodology that treats the built volume as one element within a larger ecological and topographic system.

The glazed loggia extends the home into the canopy of the surrounding trees. Floor-to-ceiling doors frame pine trunks as vertical elements that echo the timber slats inside. It is a building that borrows its proportions from the landscape it inhabits.

Plans and Drawings

The site plan reveals the villa's diagonal orientation on the promontory, optimizing views toward Friars' Bay while aligning the garden terraces with the natural contour of the slope. Floor plans show how the program distributes across split levels: living spaces and the glazed loggia occupy the levels closest to the sea, while bedrooms and the pool terrace sit on the upper floors. The roof plan confirms the extent of planted terraces and walkable surfaces above.

The sections are the most instructive drawings. They show the villa stepping down the hillside in a series of terraced volumes, with an arched opening below that recalls the vernacular construction of Ligurian coastal buildings. The relationship between interior floor levels and exterior garden terraces is legible in section in a way it could never be in plan: each level finds its own horizon line, and the continuous Botticino marble ground plane reads as a single datum even as the building descends.

Why This Project Matters

Multi-studio collaborations on residential projects are uncommon, and for good reason: ego, liability, and coordination costs usually outweigh the benefits. That Gosplan, Giordano Hadamik Architects, caarpa, and studio.skey delivered a house this coherent over a four-year process, from concept study through permitting to construction, suggests a working method worth studying. The landscape-first approach gave all four teams a shared framework that transcended their individual specializations. Architecture, interior design, and garden design were not sequential phases but simultaneous operations governed by a single material and spatial logic.

More broadly, the villa demonstrates what it means to build on ground that carries memory. The eastern edge of Recco survived a catastrophe that erased the rest of the town. The terraced gardens, maritime pines, and agricultural patterns that define this promontory are not picturesque details; they are evidence of a pre-war landscape that no longer exists anywhere else in Recco. By treating that landscape as the project's primary structure rather than a scenic amenity, the four studios made a house that honors its site without sentimentalizing it. The marble runs from room to cliff edge, the stone roughens as you climb, and the pines lean over the water as they always have.

Villa in Recco by Gosplan, Giordano Hadamik Architects, caarpa, and studio.skey. Recco, Italy. 750 m². Completed 2025. Photography by Anna Positano, Gaia Cambiaggi | Studio Campo.

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