A towering apartment in Florence

By Emma Bird

When an estate agent friend of architect Stefano Tozzi took him to view a dark, empty warehouse in Florence that had been on the market for years, he was not impressed. But the unprepossessing site housed an imposing 13-metre high tower, part of the remains of the city’s historic 19th-century Arena Goldoni, and as soon as he stepped inside it his doubts fell away.

“An image from Life of Pi came to mind,” says Tozzi, referencing the scene from the 2012 film in which Pi’s uncle Mamaji appears suspended in water, filmed from below. “He seemed to be swimming in the clouds and I said to myself, ‘The building doesn’t have any views but I need to design a house here and in this house I will have a mezzanine floor with a swimming pool’.”

He bought the property that straddles the city’s Santo Spirito and San Frediano districts in December 2015, but nearly a year passed before construction began, much of it spent verifying whether or not Florence’s strict building regulations would permit his project to go ahead. The renovations took another six years.

“When I design, I try to remove everything that’s superfluous,” he says. “Architecture is like the human body. You have the structure, which is the skeleton, and the systems, which are the organs, and then the skin. If something isn’t necessary, it goes.”

The result is a strict modular system based on a 38.5cm unit, repeated so that walls, stairs, joinery and acoustic panels align precisely and harmoniously. This approach is down to Tozzi’s early training in Japan, where he spent eight years working with architect Arata Isozaki and Japanese engineers. Drawings were sometimes rejected over discrepancies of a 10th or even 100th of a millimetre. “For the Japanese, that is an error,” he says, contrasting it with Italy’s far looser tolerances.

The property — now on sale for €13.5mn — is entered via a private garage, finished in black lime plaster with a deep red floor to avoid showing dirt. From there a corridor opens out onto the main space where the suspended swimming pool and staircase steal the show.

Canaletto walnut is used throughout and teak runs underfoot and across the staircase, which Tozzi designed to rise without intermediate supports, “like a serpent lifting itself towards the sky”. There are three bedrooms and five bathrooms, plus a cinema room, bar and access to a fitness area off the master suite. As a nod to his Sienese roots, he planted a cypress tree in the courtyard.

Translucent polycarbonate panels filter light and conceal acoustic insulation, while all the furnishings are bespoke. The custom kitchen almost disappears when not in use, with worktops sliding away and the appliances concealed.

But the greatest technical challenge was the suspended swimming pool, which filters light down to the ground floor. Florence sits in a seismic zone, and Italian regulations do not allow glass to act as a structural element. Tozzi resolved this by using steel cables.

Leaks worried him more. “There is no swimming pool that doesn’t leak,” he says. After two early sealants failed, he rebuilt the pool with a polymer normally used for car windscreens. Five years on, it remains watertight. “The pool hasn’t lost one drop,” he says. “The technician told me it was a miracle.”

Throughout the renovation, Tozzi resisted erasing the building’s past. He revealed brickwork spanning centuries and left exposed a Roman ionic column embedded in the structure.

Although he knows it will be difficult to part with the place, he reflects on how it began. “I was looking for a building with views and got something else,” he says. “Life teaches you that you make plans, but then something unexpected happens and you take another direction.”

Photography: Savills