Dimore Studio had never before worked on a house in Florence, despite the fact that Salci, 47, had been raised in nearby Arezzo. It wasn’t a region where their signature mix — a blend of jewel tones, extravagant patterns, hyper-contemporary structural elements (often in brass) and opium-den richness — finds an easy fit. “That’s a big reason the project appealed to us,” says Moran, 46, a North Carolina native who met Salci on a hotel project in China in 2003. “We liked the idea of doing something in a context that might not be instantly comfortable.” The partners also wanted a chance to work on an exterior, a new challenge for a firm that began with interior design before expanding into furniture and textiles with their Dimore Milano collection (the couple also runs a Milanese gallery focused on 20th-century design). That the house wasn’t a new build made it the perfect laboratory; instead of having to worry about blasting into rock to sink a foundation, they could devote themselves to the creative task of turning a bland residence into a proper shell for poetic rooms.

NOTHING, HOWEVER, CAME EASY. To begin with, the road to the five-acre property, which is only a 15-minute walk from the center of the city, is too narrow and twisty to accommodate a crane or large trucks, so construction materials had to be distributed among smaller vehicles. And while the owners were open to almost anything — “They really wanted to be adventurous,” says Giuseppe Porcelli, the lead architect on the project — they were forbidden by the city government to change the overall volume of the house. “At one point, I got so desperate I planned to use a helicopter to bring materials up,” Gatti says. “Of course, the local officials told me that was not going to happen.”

Fortunately, the desire to build a home that would connect Florence with the present was aided by a historical twist that may have helped convince the zoning board to let the project proceed. In the 1960s, the designers discovered, there had been a brief, unsung spurt of contemporary fervor in the nearby town of Fiesole, which resulted in six still-standing Modernist dwellings. Squared off and elegant, with a defiant simplicity, their mere existence provided both precedent and proof that the stark house on the hill would not cause culture to crumble.

The 7,500-square-foot villa, which was completed in 2018 after a three-year renovation, now hovers over the buff-and-claret-hued city like an emissary from another time: an angular, unadorned glass, concrete and stone portent of modern life. Whereas the roof was once quaintly peaked, with large overhangs and orangy clay half-round tiles characteristic of country homes in the area, it is now a slab of slate gray, with a rooftop garden of grasses and ivy. Much of the facade has been recovered with a thick cladding of steel trowel-finished plaster, while two walls are made of roughly laid sandstone bricks. Expansive new five-to-nine-foot-high windows — glass walls, really — are trimmed with thin brass and black steel edges, defining them against the cloudless sky.