On the hills around Los Angeles, in Bel Air, Michael Bay, a director famous for films like Transformers, Armageddon, and Pearl Harbor, owns an incredible villa of nearly 3,000 square meters.
A project whose realization took over 4 years of work, involving energy and resources sourced from the world’s finest.

The original project was conceived by Miami architect Chad Oppenheim who designed a villa for Bay where nothing was to be less than exceptional.
The Los Angeles architecture firm Rios Clementi Hale Studios oversaw the project’s execution. Interior designer Lorraine Letendre, from Miami, collaborated with interior designer Lynda Murray to decorate all the house’s spaces, defining the furnishings, details, and finishes of the magnificent spaces conceived by the design team.

The architectural project of the residence reserved a separate volume for the suite, in the highest part of the villa, entirely defined by glass walls that open onto the valley below and the vast metropolis.

In search of the most beautiful, spectacular, and incredible offerings for the director, Lorraine Letendre enlisted the collaboration of Pietre di Rapolano for the creation of the suite’s bathroom. This collaboration, the result of a long-standing understanding between us and the creative Miami designer, produced a bathroom truly meeting the prestigious client’s expectations.

Every time Lorraine Letendre visits the Pietre di Rapolano quarries, she is fascinated not only by the expressive power of Rapolano’s colors but also by the dramatic nature of the extracted blocks, roughly shaped by human strength, which has extracted the mountain’s precious “fruits,” awaiting processing. This expanse of blocks with yet undefined shapes became the inspiring theme for Michael Bay’s bathroom project.

The crust of the blocks, the breaking point between block and block, between block and mountain, rough, rugged, an expression of nature’s slow work, was the effect the designer wanted to transfer to the finished bathroom, contrasting crystal, technology, and steel with the “bare stone.”

Pietre di Rapolano interpreted her will, cutting pieces from the blocks that are normally the trimming of them, before cutting, the “crust” indeed.

The squaring of the blocks, selected from many cut blocks, allowed for obtaining slabs smooth on one side but rugged on the other, of large format, great weight, and thickness. Each piece was inspected, chosen, cared for, “trimmed” to size, packed, and transported to the other side of the globe to decorate the finished bathroom.

See the executive drawings that are the result of a compromise between the designer’s desires for ever larger, clean, expressive slabs and the real possibilities of obtaining these. Other special elements were made in Pietre di Rapolano for this project: a solid stone bathtub, a cabinet entirely covered with slabs, whose engineering required the use of slides and gears specially designed given the significant weight of a stone cabinet. A floor of large-format slabs, already an element of excellence and prestige in a normal project, completes a unique work.

For us, it was an incredible opportunity to engage with a client and designers representing the pinnacle of creative and realization possibilities.

The work carried out and completed confirms that a small Tuscan company can also satisfy such demanding clients.
References:

Arch. Chad Oppenheim
Studio Rios Clementi Hale Studios
Interior designer Lorraine Letendre
Interior Designer Lynda Murray
Pietre di Rapolano
AD journalist Mayer Rus
AD photographer Roger Davies

Go to the online article on ArchitecturalDigest.com

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