Villa Serena

Set on a south-facing hillside in the Val d'Orcia, Villa Serena is a new-build residence conceived in dialogue with the vernacular farmhouse typology of Tuscany. The project began with an intensive landscape study to understand the topography, prevailing winds, and patterns of light across the seasons before a single line was drawn.

The building is organised around a central courtyard — an ancient device that creates shade in summer, collects warmth in winter, and provides a sheltered outdoor room that extends the liveable area of the house for nine months of the year. The walls are load-bearing stone, quarried locally, giving the house an honest relationship with its site.

Internally, the rooms are few but generous: a double-height living and dining space opening onto the courtyard, a kitchen of almost monastic restraint, and four bedroom suites each with a private loggia oriented to the south and east. The materials — rough-hewn stone, terracotta tile, lime plaster, and aged chestnut timber — are all sourced within a fifty-kilometre radius.

The pool and terraced garden were designed by landscape architect Giulia Marchetti as a sequence of outdoor rooms that step down the hillside, terminating in an olive grove that predates the house by two centuries. At dusk, the lighting scheme picks out the olive trees and the stone walls, creating a composition that is read differently with every shift in the weather.