Rosalia Sanni, principal designer and owner of Rosalia Sanni Design, transformed a hillside property in Greenwich with structure and rhythm, utilizing natural stone walls to define the suburban setting.
Stone walls give structure to the setting, and the pool deck is made of Madras Grey sandstone, a natural material from India that has a softer texture and stays cooler in the sun than bluestone.
The geometric sensibility of the new covered porch influenced the outdoor scheme, according to Lina Cangrejo, setting designer at Rosalia Sanni Design. “We paid close attention to the house design, so the setting feels like an extension,” she says.
Decluttering the hill behind the pool created a grassy play space, while the trees offer privacy screening, and a dramatic natural rock outcropping is framed in this view from a path along the new barn-style garage.
On the street side, the renovation included construction of a new garage connected to the house by a glass-framed breezeway, which provides entrée to a stepping-stone path leading to the pool.
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Rosalia Sanni notes that setting design often involves a leap of faith, as concept development and schematics notwithstanding, “To a certain point, the vision exists only in our imagination.”
This project in Greenwich involved rethinking and remaking the property around a traditional 7,200-square-foot stone-and-shingle house that was itself undergoing a major renovation.
“We were fortunate to have clients who believed in us,” Sanni says, and the plan to modernize and expand the house included adding a pool and adjacent covered porch at the rear of the structure and improving the underutilized 1.12-acre lot.
From the start, Sanni and Cangrejo were able to dovetail their grounds program with the renovation plan executed by the architects at Alisberg Parker, resulting in a setting that wraps the updated home’s architecture, the land’s topography, and the family’s lifestyle into one harmonious panorama.
With a raised contour, the existing setting was cluttered with trees and overgrowth, but Sanni and her team were able to create a more functional and aesthetically pleasing space by culling the planting and making room for kids to play and adults to walk in the woods along the border.
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Now the hillside offers a protective atmosphere, and stone walls reflect the geometry of the architecture, their straight lines providing year-round structure and rhythm that balance the natural informality of the rolling lawn and border greenery.
“We thought about sight lines and scale,” says Sanni, who intentionally kept the defining stone walls at a maximum height of three feet to keep the planting beds atop them at eye level.
At night, carefully planned outdoor lighting illuminates the walls and distant trees, creating “a little glow everywhere,” according to Sanni, who notes that “there is nothing better than standing in the space and seeing it when it’s done.”
Setting design: Rosalia Sanni Design
