A 1930s Ligurian beach apartment renovated not by opening walls, but by threading a single piece of furniture through every room. Genoa-based llabb was commissioned by a California family to convert a raised ground-floor unit in a historic seafront villa in Levanto — a port town 12.5 meters from the beach — into a full-time residence. What makes the project precise is the constraint the studio refused to engineer around: load-bearing masonry partitions meant the plan could not be freely reconfigured, so every functional requirement had to be absorbed by the millwork itself.
The brief was ambitious for a 104 sqm envelope: three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a remote-work study, a large kitchen, and a generous living room. Levanto was chosen by the clients — Erika and Morgan from Orange County, California — not for its proximity to the Cinque Terre but for its resistance to it. Said the studio: “Levanto feels alive. Alive with year-round residents, with families who have been coming to the sea for generations.” The apartment, part of the early twentieth-century seafront development locally known as “the Blondet house,” retains its original polychrome marble entrance ramp — including the locally quarried Levanto red marble — as the threshold condition that bespoke interior design then builds from.
The spatial logic that llabb recovered was already latent in the original plan. Two bedrooms and a study occupy the north side; bathrooms and service functions compress into a central band; the living area and kitchen claim the full south face, opening directly toward the beach. The move that unlocks the plan is a shortening of the service corridor — originally a segmented route with a right-angle turn — to reveal and reinforce the apartment’s primary axis: a direct enfilade connecting the two seafront rooms, expanding the compact apartment renovation and sharpening its orientation toward the water.
Organizing every square meter is a continuous band of custom oak millwork, partially lacquered in a deep matte blue and partially finished with a clear acrylic coat, executed in two construction phases. It runs without interruption: kitchen cabinetry, dining bench, TV unit, bookcase, storage niches, corridor changing niche, children’s beds, desk, fold-down bed in the study, built-in wardrobes, and master headboard — all one system. The studio described it as “the leitmotif of the project… deep blue and oak that runs through the entire apartment like a long wave stretching toward the horizon.”
Wood performs two registers simultaneously in this Liguria residential renovation, and the shift between them is deliberate. In the living and kitchen zones it is precise, restrained, and structural — close to nautical joinery in its economy of section. In the children’s room it becomes something else entirely: curved bunk bed profiles, rope netting at the upper level, a painted deep blue ceiling, and bench supports whose metal brackets were explicitly shaped to reference surfboard fins. llabb trained as a carpentry workshop before becoming an architectural practice, and the children’s room is where that origin shows most directly.
Visual connections between rooms are preserved and amplified through carefully positioned openings and alignments rather than demolished partitions. Two large metal frames replace the wall that once divided the two south-facing rooms, joining living and kitchen without collapsing their distinction. The 3.2-meter ceiling height — generous for the floor area — is never subdivided, keeping the Levanto apartment interior perceptually larger than its 104 sqm suggest. Natural oak herringbone parquet flooring runs continuously beneath, anchoring the chromatic palette of deep blue lacquer, warm oak grain, and white plaster walls.
The bathrooms resolve in opposite directions. The master bathroom deploys a darker palette with a Rexa space-saving washbasin unit and black metal fittings — controlled and close to minimal. The secondary bathroom takes the opposite register: warmer, softer tones, with a custom travertine washbasin designed by llabb and an oak base fabricated by Falegnameria Ratto in Genoa. Both rooms treat materiality as an extension of the same chromatic logic governing the rest of the apartment, rather than as a separate decorative problem — a consistency that a less disciplined renovation would have broken at precisely this point.
The furniture selection — Carl Hansen CH24 chairs, an Extendo Balance table, a Ditre Italia Sanders sofa, a Carl Hansen CH07 armchair — was chosen for tonal compatibility with the millwork rather than iconographic contrast. The studio was direct about the consequence: “The extensive millwork leaves little room for additional large furniture pieces, and this was the only way to accommodate all the required functions within (just?) 100 square meters.” This is the real argument of the project: the small apartment interior design succeeds not despite the millwork consuming the floor area but because it does, converting what would otherwise be storage, circulation, and freestanding furniture into a single spatial instrument.
The project confirms something llabb has been building toward since its origin as a Genoa carpentry workshop: that furniture-scale thinking can operate at the scale of a complete floor plan. The risk in this approach is homogeneity — a single material running wall to wall risks reading as surface rather than architecture. Surf House avoids this because the tonal shift between lacquered blue and natural oak, and the behavioral shift between the serious millwork of the living zone and the playful sculpture of the children’s room, keeps the system legible as a sequence of distinct spatial events. Whether that calibration holds across decades of inhabitation — as the children grow out of the bunk bed phase and the playful register becomes either charming or dated — is the one question the photographs cannot answer.
Surf House in Levanto by llabb | Location: Levanto, La Spezia, Liguria, Italy — Year: 2025 — Key materials: oak blockboard millwork (lacquered and clear-coated), deep blue lacquer, natural oak herringbone parquet, Levanto red marble, travertine