Villa Marchi is a building of Carlo Scarpa’s Venice school, designed by architect Oscar Marchi at Noventa Padovana in the late 1950s. A work of Functionalist architecture with all the stark simplicity this implies, the Villa is now used as a home with adjoining medical consulting room and since 2021 it has undergone major renovation by 3ndy Studio, in a project which has aimed to highlight its distinctive features, including lavish use of bare brick. The main challenge facing the architects was to conserve the original materials as far as possible but enhance them with more modern solutions, to improve the building’s thermal and acoustic insulation without reducing its uncluttered character.

To combine functional performance with stylistic consistency, in partnership with Marazzi the architecture firm designed a floating paving in porcelain stoneware, used seamlessly across the yard, on the terrace and around the pool: the immaculate result underlines the villa’s unusual ground plan. The advantage of a raised floating paving is that it creates a continuous void beneath the surface to accommodate all utility systems, ensuring optimal integration with the surroundings and flexibility in the routing of systems themselves.

The collection chosen for the paving was Cementum20, which combines the technological properties of stoneware 20 mm thick with an in-depth cast concrete look, with the addition of the High Performance technology for heavily-used surfaces. High Performance delivers superior technical characteristics in accordance with the toughest international standards and the most restrictive project specifications. The final application of anti-reflective glaze made the soft-touch, anti-slip surface extremely realistic.

Today Villa Marchi expresses a fine balance between conservation and innovation, aesthetics and efficiency, in a discreet yet highly distinctive architectural language with superior performance.