Step Inside a Concrete Beach House on Long Island That’s Infused With Warmth

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.”