Villa in Recco is a minimalist residence located in Recco, Italy, designed by Gosplan, Giordano Hadamik Architects, caarpa, and studio.skey. Twenty-two RAF bombers dropped 33 tons of explosives on the town in November 1943 while targeting the railway bridge, and the Ligurian village around it was razed. The promontory on the eastern edge survived, and with it a system of terraced gardens and private villas that preserves the pre-war shape of a coastline otherwise rebuilt from nothing. Restoring a house here is less an architectural problem than a question of how to behave inside a surviving fragment.

Botticino marble carries that question through the whole project. Luigi Vietti specified it heavily during Recco’s reconstruction, most visibly at the Town Hall, and the architects have laid large slabs of it in strict continuity with the indoor flooring, running the material of civic repair straight out of the living room and around the pool. Further from the house the white regular hardscape gives way to local split gray stone, a deliberate coarsening that lets the humanized ground dissolve into the park before it reaches the rock.

The pool sits on a rotated axis calibrated to the cliff profile rather than to the building, and a movable floor system raises its bottom on demand, shifting depth, altering the color of the water, and finally erasing the pool into a continuous walkable terrace. Hydraulic stage machinery reappears here as landscape strategy. What reads as a line of water sliding seaward can also read as pure surface, which matters on a 4,500 square meter park where the sea view is the primary asset.

Five meters of clear height turn the living room into a loggia, a covered garden carved from the villa’s mass, with a large timber pergola filtering the light. The original volume was never stereometric, having been stretched and stacked to meet the steep terrain, and that awkwardness becomes the asset. Each floor opens onto its own portion of garden, so the house is entered laterally at several levels instead of vertically from a single base.