Theater in the Pines: Roccamare Villa Renovation by VMCF Atelier

In the sun-drenched Tuscan Maremma, architecture recognizes its place as the frame rather than art piece, as evidenced by the collection of modernist villas that line its coast. For an eight-kilometer stretch, the coastal forests of Roccamare serve as a private, sun-dappled proscenium where the “spatial stars” of Italian Modernism—Ernesto Nathan Rogers (of BBPR fame), Franco Albini, and Ignazio Gardella, among them—once choreographed a series of “villas in the pinewood” (ville in pineta). Since the post-war decade of 1955–1965, these homes have followed the orography of the land, respecting the dimensions and limits dictated by a nature untamed in both beauty and rawness, drawing equally tempestuous names like Carlo Ponti, Sophia Loren, Roger Moore, and Claudia Cardinale.

It is within this Mediterranean theater that architects Valerio Ferrari and Cinzia Mazzone of VMCF Atelier (Visual Machine Concept Facilities) have performed a duteous, art-driven restyling of a 1970s residence with a guest dépendance by Italian architect Ugo Miglietta. A stone’s throw away from the sea, the property covers almost one hectare and is one of over two hundred modernist villas built by Miglietta between 1963 and the 1980s within the private residential complex of Roccamare, a space of childhood fondness for Ferrari.

“It is a magical place because it is unspoiled and wild,” he says. “It is not crowded, not even in August (The height of Etruscan summer)!”

Design movement

True to their name and their background in designing sets for opera and dance in Paris and Milan, Ferrari and Mazzone have turned the villa’s aged interiors into a sequence of dramatic reveals, using bold colors and finishes and incorporating spatial choreography into normally rigid architectural elements.

One’s visit to the 240-sqm villa begins with the understated entrance, marked by a white iron staircase that serves as a sculptural sentinel, leading the eye upward to a rooftop terrace before one even enters the home. The crisp lines of the façade and its formidable sandstone shell evoke the earthy modernism that Miglietta ascribed to Roccamare, one that VMCF Atelier painstakingly preserved to keep the villa’s midcentury-long dialogue with its environment intact.

VMCF Atelier’s theatrical flair is on full display within. The villa’s bleached maple doors pirouette on a central axis, theatre wings that Mazzone says “blur the boundaries between rooms and create ambiguous spaces.” This sense of the scenic component is anchored by a bespoke steel media cabinet that incorporates a screen, audiovisual setup, and storage, which the couple playfully dubbed the “media boar.” The angular contraption moves in and out of a wall like stage machinery, allowing users to reconfigure the room.

Echoing the implied upward movement of the media boar’s diagonal supports, the villa’s windows incorporate a high-design subtext: floor-to-ceiling window frames crossed by diagonal steel frames, reminiscent of the New Brutalist rigor of Alison and Peter Smithson’s Hexenhaus in Germany.

Color theory

If the original Castiglione sandstone walls form the stage, the living room floor is the prima donna. For two weeks, VMCF Atelier surrendered to the polychromatic eye of German artist Peter Zimmermann, who then applied seven layers of epoxy resin to create an extraordinary piece of “floor art.”

The color palette, a vibrant, energetic contrast to the house’s earthy shell, was chosen to highlight the villa’s features through reverberation. The resin is so brightly saturated and shiny that it acts like a mirror; when the sun bleeds through the pines, the floor pulls the forest inside, reflecting iridescent arboreal views below the bleached maple furniture, the OSB-topped dining table, and folding wicker chairs. This “liquid” floor creates constant indoor-outdoor interaction, a dominant feature that makes the heavy sandstone walls feel as though they are hovering over a multicolored pool of light.

Ferrari and Mazzone’s personal histories are etched into the villa walls through their art collection. In the kitchen, tiles carry motifs inspired by the drawings of Chilean painter Roberto Sebastian Matta, a 1990s collaborator of Ferrari’s. In the dépendance, young German sculptor Christian Henkel contributed a plywood cabinet sculpture, its blue and pink geometric lines acting as a focal point for the guest quarters.

Material memory

The architectural scenography extends into the private quarters and the adjoining 60-sqm guest dépendance, where the script transitions from loud to intimate. In the bedrooms, the studio employs a more minimalist vernacular, choosing instead to banner the tactility of materials used, from the custom-made jute headboards, the lacquered pine wardrobes, to the two-toned micro-cement floor. Pendant lamps by Italian glass artist Maria Grazia Rosin are the otherworldly light sources that top each bedroom, fusing the delicate forms and hues of Murano glass with the fluidity of Technogel, an experimental plasticizer-free material.

The most honest “backstage” moment in the villa awaits in the main bathroom. VMCF Atelier performed architectural archaeology by removing a section of upper wall tiles and leaving the residual glue patterns exposed as an abstract pattern. Ochre-shaded Le Corbusier LCS ceramics from Gigacer act as backdrop to the exposed plumbing that connects the bathtub and shower, further emphasizing the space’s material honesty.

An ongoing dialogue

For all its interior drama, VMCF Atelier’s Roccamare Villa humbly yields to the landscape. The studio prefers to regard itself as its steward rather than a space shaper. “We have tried to create a dialogue with the surrounding area,” Ferrari explains, naming a list of Italian architects and culturati like Di Salvo, Quaroni, and Pier Niccolò Berardi who have cemented Maremma’s coastal identity. “[They] were able to interpret the characteristics of the territory in an exceptional way, preserving its identity and adapting the new settlements to the morphology and landscape of the places, and we wanted to do the same.”

VMCF Atelier restored the villa’s sandstone façade, integrated a rainwater cistern for the garden and swimming pool into the terrain, acting as much as arborists as architects, tending to the tall maritime pines while planting native cork, strawberry, and mastic trees.

The final bow in the studio’s architectural performance is taken on the red-tiled roof terrace, furnished simply with deck chairs, a lounge, and throw pillows. A vantage point oriented towards the sea, this is where Ferrari and Mazzone can unwind amidst the lofty Tuscan pines behind, their leafy whispers continuing to animate the wind, communicating the same secrets that so entranced Ugo Miglietta more than half a century ago. •

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