Concrete Beach House

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“Step Inside a Concrete Beach House on Long Island That’s Infused With Warmth” appeared in Architectural Digest on April 17, 2023

Photography Jason Schmidt Studio

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To balance the unorthodox weekend retreat, architect RafFaella Bortoluzzi mixed severe materials like black stone with textured oak touches

It’s hard to put a label on Raffaella Bortoluzzi’s architectural style. In addition to her other designs, Bortoluzzi—who was born in Venice and helms the New York architectural firm Labo Design Studio—has crafted a wavy zinc-clad vacation home for the arts philanthropist Maja Hoffmann that juts up like a sculpture from the jungled hillside of Mustique. She fashioned a jaunty multicolor modernist box for decorator Muriel Brandolini’s Hamptons getaway. She infused the New York branch of luxury jeweler Pomellato with full-out Deco glamour. Her own Little Italy apartment, with its custom-made blackened-steel kitchen, is an ode to minimalist industrial chic. “It’s very difficult in a culture like ours, where everything is imitated, to have a confidence in your own hand, as Raffaella has,” recalled the late architect Rafael Viñoly, for whom Bortoluzzi worked after earning a master’s degree from Columbia University’s graduate school of architecture. “She possesses a strange and wonderful combination of Italian sensitivity and strict New York training. She has a sound signature but it’s not connected to a stylistic trend.”

Venice was an ideal incubator for Bortoluzzi, who radiates elegance even beneath a construction hat. “Growing up in Venice was magical—you don’t realize that until you leave,” she says with a laugh. “Complexity and contradiction are at every corner, where the work of skilled craftsmen enhances every detail. You absorb all that history, all the little details that you see in buildings throughout the city.” While earning her bachelor’s degree at Venice’s prestigious Istituto Universitario di Architettura, Bortoluzzi spent a year studying in Lisbon, where she came under the influence of the great Portuguese architects Eduardo Souto de Moura and Álvaro Siza, who sculpted concrete and other inexpensive materials into a myriad of visually poetic public projects. Then there was graduate school in New York, followed by stints with Viñoly and Richard Gluckman, who in the 1990s was transforming the Chelsea district with his elegantly minimal gallery spaces. Since launching Labo Design Studio, in 2001, she’s honed her own distinctive approach to design with an emphasis on innovative materials and evocative forms.

A weekend retreat that Bortoluzzi recently completed for a European-American couple on eastern Long Island may be her most unorthodox creation to date: a beach house whose severe concrete exterior reveals serene glass-walled interiors that allow the sublime landscape to penetrate the rooms. A series of interconnected boxlike volumes, clad with precast concrete panels textured with the patterns of wood bark, appear as if scattered across a verdant lawn sloping to a pond. “The clients’ plan called for a big house, but I didn’t want to spoil the peaceful landscape with a fortress,” Bortoluzzi recalls. “I always try to create a little story about the architecture I’m about to design, and when I first visited the site I imagined dice thrown on the table, little rocks on the landscape, and as you walk through them you experience the different views from inside.”

The warm, compelling properties of wood infuse the interiors—from the 400 precast concrete panels Bortoluzzi designed for the walls, each featuring a different pattern and variety of wood, to the 14-foot-high, 48-inch-wide patterned oak front door and the brushed oak steps of a sensually curved staircase. Inspired by her compatriot Giuseppe Penone, who makes sculptures from trees, she designed a 10-foot-long sink in the main bath that’s hand-carved from a single slab of iroko wood.

The furnishings throughout the six-bedroom, 14,000-square-foot house were orchestrated by the Paris-based firm Pinto, whose founder, Alberto Pinto, had decorated the couple’s Manhattan residence before his death in 2012. It’s a sophisticated, understated mix of contemporary and vintage designs featuring lots of curves to offset the house’s geometric rigor. In the living room, a pair of custom-made half-moon sofas and sculptural 1980s Howard Werner side tables surround a ceramic cocktail table by the French sculptor Agnès Debizet. Pierre Charpin’s doughnut-like console plays off a swooping Ellsworth Kelly sculpture above it in the entry. The couple, who collect art, have judiciously displayed some of the contemporary works they own, including striking sculptures by Simone Leigh and Anish Kapoor and spare abstract paintings by Korean artists Chung Sang-Hwa and Chung Chang-Sup.

Not one to rest on her laurels, the intrepid architect is now at work on a variety of projects, continuing to push the envelope when it comes to form and materiality. For gallerist David Totah, she is constructing an artists’ retreat on Pantelleria, where she has happily buried herself in the research of the island’s ancient stone dammusi and must obey—and yet seems wildly inspired to come up with a contemporary solution for—the island’s strict rules demanding the use of rocks from the property. For another house on Long Island, she has conceived a design in which the entire residence is made of smooth poured concrete, without a shred of sheetrock. (Double concrete walls will allow for insulation.) “I need to think about every light switch,” she says with a mix of worry and ebullience. “If there’s a mistake, there’s a mistake. You can’t destroy the walls.”

Her old boss Rafael Viñoly, in an interview before his death this past March, teasingly made note of Bortoluzzi’s self-torturing process: “She pushes herself to the limit. And if there are mistakes, she won’t rest till she fixes them.” Richard Gluckman sees things a little differently. “How do you say ‘joie de vivre’ in Italian?” he wonders out loud.

“There’s a sense of joy Raffaella brings to every project.” ❧

Writing: @vickylowry
Photography: @jasonschmidtstudio
Styling: @misterngo
Interior Decorating: @albertopintoagency
Architecture: @labodesignstudio
Landscape Design: @nathaliekargallery