Ligurian Memories

170 sqm - 2024

An early 20th-century villa in Alassio, one of those classic structures that still grace the waterfronts of Ligurian towns from Levante to Ponente. With its stucco facade, whitewashed wooden shutters, palm trees, and the sea just beyond the garden. “These were the forerunners of vacation homes, solid and upper-middle-class architecture without ostentation, the first to colonize the Ligurian coast and secure the extraordinary seaside locations,” say Andrea Marcante and Adelaide Testa, founding partners of the Marcante-Testa studio in Turin. The duo found the villa already renovated, freshly painted in apricot, and divided into six vacation apartments. Commissioned by a young family, they renovated one of the duplex apartments on the second floor, featuring a small terrace with turned balustrades.

The apartment boasts a generous 170 square meters, diffused sunlight, and enviable views. However, the interiors had a very commercial layout, with no trace of past grandeur. […] Rectifying volumes and creating perspective views with their elegant touch is certainly not a problem: they clad the iron column with rattan, incorporating a passing shelf and a valet stand; the beam becomes a bookshelf, and in the living room, a neo-romantic wallpaper with roses and peonies and Franco Albini’s Margherita chair in woven Indian cane evoke the feeling of a winter garden. Finding the soul of the space is the most complex challenge; it requires a theme that connects the rooms, the furniture, and the context, without giving the impression of a faux antique but rather bringing the villa back to its roots. Andrea Marcante and Adelaide Testa meet the challenge with a game of overlays. They start with terrazzo flooring, a direct reference to the material of choice at the beginning of the century. Then they continue, decade by decade, citing the heterogeneous style of Ligurian vacation homes: the bon ton of the fifties, the popular homes of the sixties boom, and the condominiums of the seventies.

In the apartment, they include a bit of everything, transforming even stereotypes into assets, mixing patterns, glossy finishes, vintage furniture, their custom abstract designs, and a pastel palette. “Color is central to our projects and is never an end in itself. It serves to highlight perspectives and views, direct the gaze, and define a space. It is not just about decoration or matching; our palettes follow precise logic that gives the color fields the importance of the material itself.”

Ironically, poetically, balancing between invention and rigor, the two dress the bare apartment, also considering the clients’ requests for three bedrooms and four bathrooms for guests. The result is an unexpected family seaside home. The Turin studio has a strong identity and a desire to experiment, to challenge itself without ever repeating. Here in Alassio, the balance is between naturalness and artifice. “Eclecticism is an antidote to homes that are too static and conservative,” asserts Testa, the studio’s interior designer. The other half of the duo, architect Marcante, explains that domestic space is personal and protective, “the most private place of all, but not necessarily the most boring and conventional.” A lesson in freedom and imagination learned from the masters of design and architecture, which the two know how to reinvent with each project.