On the verdant hillside fringe of Florence, where centuries-old gardens merge with the city’s edge, Florentine and Zurich-based practice bucci quentin has completed Arcipressi — a renovation of a residential wing belonging to a historic villa, conceived as a quiet, light-filled home in which every material decision carries the weight of the landscape surrounding it.
The project begins with a position rather than a programme. Florence’s hillside belt is not an easy context to build within — it carries accumulated layers of history, botanical memory, and a particular quality of light that resists easy translation into interior space. The house overlooks the garden of Villa Fabbricotti and, in continuity, the park of the Stibbert Museum: a layered green system that informed the entire spatial logic of this Florence villa renovation. Sara Bucci and Costanza Quentin, who founded bucci quentin in 2022 after years working between Florence and Zürich, approached the project not as an opportunity to impose a new spatial order but to attune the existing fabric to its context — to reestablish, as they describe it, “a fluid continuity across eras, materials, and spatial thresholds.”
The clients — a couple with a young daughter — brought a brief shaped by genuine environmental commitment: a conscious focus on material quality, sustainability, and responsible processes that guided every procurement decision from joinery to stone. Every piece of furniture in Arcipressi is custom-designed and fabricated by local artisans in Florence and Fiesole. The kitchen joinery is oak joinery with a natural finish, topped with 4cm Carrara marble slabs — Canaloni white, cut by A. Nannini di Carlo Nannini in Fiesole. The herringbone parquet — Listone Giordano oak, micro-beveled, laid at 90° — runs continuously through the living spaces, grounding the interior in a material warmth that reads as unhurried and deliberate. This commitment to locally sourced craftsmanship recalls the same material discipline that Margine Studio brought to the Lèvanzo House renovation in Puglia, where reclaimed Rosa del Garda marble anchored a similarly restrained spatial language rooted in the specificity of its region. The result is what the architects call a “slow rhythm of inhabitation”: a house that constructs atmosphere rather than scenography, shaped by the passage of light across textured surfaces rather than by any signature gesture.
Visual permeability organises the plan. The 150-square-meter residence is defined by large openings that frame glimpses of centuries-old trees, allowing natural light to move gradually through the rooms rather than flood them. Spatial thresholds are soft rather than defined — the living room opens toward the garden as a true extension of the interior, dissolving the boundary between inside and outside in a way that shares certain instincts with Punto Zero’s Casa Harmonía in Rome, where a continuous lacquered boiserie similarly erased the divisions between discrete rooms in favour of an uninterrupted spatial narrative. The kitchen, designed in its entirety by bucci quentin, sits within this same logic of continuity. The white-painted exposed roof structure — original timber beams painted out to unify the ceiling plane — creates a generous sense of volume without weight. The staircase, crafted by hand from concrete and steel, was ground back to reveal the aggregate within, introducing a raw tactile counterpoint to the warmth of the oak joinery and marble surfaces.
The material palette extends its discipline into colour. The bathrooms introduce the project’s most concentrated moments of chromatic decision: green lacquered cabinetry with oak interiors, MIPA terrazzo in the SLABS collection, Guarducci Mario Srl stonework from Prato. These are not decorative interventions but spatial ones — the green of the bathroom cabinetry echoes the garden beyond the windows, pulling the exterior into the most private rooms of the house. The Artemide Dioscuri wall lamp appears in the bathrooms as a recurring punctuation mark, its spherical diffuser softening light in spaces where materiality is already doing significant work.
Along the edge of the garden, an existing small orangerie was restored and reinterpreted by bucci quentin with what the architects describe as “lightness and inventiveness.” The structure — a steel and glass pavilion painted in a soft sage green — becomes a flexible threshold between interior and exterior life: part winter garden, part reading room, part extension of the terrace. Its materiality is deliberately different from the main residence, lighter and more provisional in character, as if it has always belonged to the garden rather than to the house. The 45-square-meter terrace and 500-square-meter garden complete the spatial sequence, extending the domestic experience into a landscape of mature trees and stone walls that predates the renovation by generations.
bucci quentin — Sara Bucci and Costanza Quentin — bring to Arcipressi a sensibility formed between two cities and two architectural cultures. Both studied at the University of Florence and at RWTH Aachen, and both spent formative years working in Zürich before returning to Florence to co-found their practice. Their approach combines what they describe as “essentiality, material poetics, and an open interdisciplinary process” — a phrase that reads accurately in the completed work. Arcipressi sits within a growing body of Italian residential practice that treats historic villa renovation as spatial narrative rather than restoration: studiotamat’s Casa Continua in Rome pursued a similarly precise approach, in which the continuity of surface and threshold became the project’s central argument. What connects these practices is a shared refusal to treat any surface as incidental — whether grinding a concrete staircase tread to reveal its aggregate, or routing summer air conditioning through bespoke oak joinery elements rather than expose ductwork. The renovation was designed between May 2022 and November 2023, with construction running from December 2024 to February 2026.
What Arcipressi demonstrates most precisely is that renovation of a historic villa fragment need not produce nostalgia or pastiche, nor does it require the deliberate rupture that some practices use to signal their presence. The house is quietly, confidently contemporary — and it is entirely at ease with its surroundings. That combination is harder to achieve than it looks.