My Villa designs and builds modern Italian villas across California — reinforced concrete homes that carry 2,000 years of Mediterranean typology and stay insurable through the state's wildfire cycles. The courtyard, the podium, the portico, the pergola: an architecture refined for a climate exactly like California's, reinterpreted in the museum-grade concrete of the partners behind Renzo Piano's Kimbell Art Museum and the Pinault Collection's Palazzo Grassi.
The Italian villa is not a style to be reproduced in California. It is a building system — developed for a Mediterranean climate that California shares almost exactly — and when it is built in reinforced concrete, it becomes the rare luxury home that stays insurable, livable and valuable through the fire cycles ahead.
Central Italy and coastal California are climate twins. Both are Mediterranean climates: hot, dry summers, mild winters, strong seasonal winds, intense low-angle light. The architecture that two thousand years of Italian building refined for those conditions — at Hadrian's Villa Adriana in Tivoli, at the Villa Medici in Rome, at Palladio's Villa La Rotonda near Vicenza — was an answer to the same environmental questions a homeowner faces today in Malibu, Montecito or Bel Air.
That answer is a set of spatial strategies, not a decorative vocabulary:
None of this is nostalgia. It is the same passive-design logic that climate engineers specify today — which is why My Villa develops every project with Transsolar, the climate-engineering practice behind the Harvard Science Complex and the Mercedes-Benz Museum. The Italian villa simply arrived at these principles first, and has had two millennia to perfect them.
Every My Villa commission begins from one of four foundational typologies, each a proven Italian villa configuration calibrated to the geometry of your California site — flat lot, view parcel, extensive estate or steep hillside. They are starting points, fully personalised in materials, proportion and finish, never fixed catalogue plans.
Organised around an open sky. The interior courtyard as the heart of domestic life — best suited to flat lots and canyon sites.
Two volumes meeting at a right angle, sheltering a garden and framing the landscape from every room. Suited to view lots and corner parcels.
A sequence of independent volumes linked by circulation — each function its own structure. Suited to extensive and multigenerational sites.
Architecture that steps with the terrain, levels cascading down the slope, each opening to its own horizon. Built for California's steep sites.
What stays constant across all four is the structural logic — reinforced concrete, a non-combustible envelope, passive thermal comfort — because that logic is the insurability guarantee. The Italian villa gives the home its soul; the concrete gives it its permanence.
A My Villa is not a wood-frame house dressed as a villa. It is cast in architectural concrete by DGU, the Italian construction firm whose built work includes Renzo Piano's Kimbell Art Museum expansion in Fort Worth and the Pinault Collection's Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana in Venice for Tadao Ando. The craftsmanship that makes those buildings culturally permanent is the same craftsmanship that makes a villa in California non-combustible.
Concrete is also where the Italian villa and the California fire reality meet. The home is a layered non-combustible system from the slab to the fence line, engineered to satisfy three overlapping standards at once:
250 mm reinforced concrete walls — a 4+ hour fire rating with no wood studs and no combustible cladding. The structure itself is the fire barrier.
Multi-pane tempered glass and SFM-certified WUI-compliant vents — the single most important ember-entry defence per IBHS research.
Fire-rated concrete roof, enclosed boxed eaves and non-combustible soffits to stop ember accumulation at the roof-wall junction.
A non-combustible five-foot perimeter with fire-smart Mediterranean planting — olive, lavender, succulents — designed as an IBHS prerequisite, not an afterthought.
This is what earns up to 50% in wildfire premium discounts from carriers that recognise IBHS Wildfire Prepared Home Plus. It is also what makes the home appraise at a premium: in comparable California markets, resilient concrete construction has been associated with appraisal premiums of up to 6% over conventional wood-frame, per the NAR Cost vs. Value Report.
California's insurance market has reshaped what a luxury home is. Across the state's high Fire Hazard Severity Zones, admitted carriers have paused new business, non-renewed long-held policies, and pushed wood-frame homes toward the FAIR Plan and surplus-lines market. In that environment, your builder's choice of structural system is also your insurance underwriter's decision.
A My Villa is engineered to clear the bar on the first pass. Because it is reinforced concrete, it natively meets the 2026 California WUI Code (Title 24, Part 7), the California Department of Insurance's 12-measure Safer from Wildfires framework, and IBHS Wildfire Prepared Home Plus — the three standards admitted carriers such as Mercury, USAA, Travelers and Chubb use to underwrite and discount coverage. The home is insurable at the time of its certificate of occupancy, not after years of retrofits.
Reinforced concrete costs more than wood frame up front — roughly 3% of total construction cost in comparable luxury projects. We do not hide that premium. What it buys is insurability at occupancy, substantially lower lifetime maintenance, and a building envelope designed to last centuries rather than decades. Insurance savings alone typically offset the premium within 2–5 years; everything beyond that — appreciation, reduced maintenance, insurability where others have lost it — is net to the homeowner. We set out the full math in the Journal: the 3% premium that unlocks up to 50% insurance savings.
Every commission includes a site-specific project-economics analysis — insurance positioning, resale and value-retention scenarios, design and resilience specification, lifecycle maintenance. It is advisory and transparent: scenarios with clear assumptions, never promises without context.
My Villa is the Los Angeles practice of IT'S Architecture (Rome · Paris), the research-driven studio co-founded by Paolo Mezzalama in 2016. It coordinates a collaboration of specialists, each a leader in their discipline:
Rome · Paris. NAJA recognition, Italian National Architecture Prize. Piazza dei Cinquecento, Termini, FOROF.
Treviso · Los Angeles · Baja California. Palazzo Grassi, Punta della Dogana, Kimbell Art Museum.
Stuttgart · New York. 30+ years. Harvard Science Complex, Masdar City, Mercedes-Benz Museum.
Milan · New York. 40 years, 90+ projects. Politecnico Milano (Piano), Fondazione Rovati Museum.
More on the studio and our Journal editorial standards is on the Team page.
Our primary footprint is the Los Angeles Westside and the Santa Barbara coast. For Malibu specifically — its coastal-zone review, fire-zone underwriting and rebuild pathways — see our dedicated guide to building a fire-resilient luxury home in Malibu. We take on a limited number of commissions per year to keep founder-led design on every project.
Yes. The Italian villa is a spatial and structural system — courtyard, podium, portico, pergola, thermal-mass walls — developed for a Mediterranean climate that parallels California. My Villa builds the typology in reinforced concrete, so a modern Italian villa here is also a non-combustible, insurable home that meets the 2026 California WUI Code and IBHS Wildfire Prepared Home Plus natively.
Custom luxury construction in California's prime markets typically runs from $1,500 to $3,500+ per square foot, depending on site, finishes and structural system. A reinforced-concrete Italian villa carries roughly a 3% premium over equivalent wood-frame construction — usually offset within 2–5 years by wildfire insurance savings of up to 50% through IBHS-certified carriers (Mercury, USAA, Travelers, Chubb).
Central Italy and coastal California share a Mediterranean climate — hot dry summers, mild winters, seasonal winds. The Italian villa was refined over two millennia for exactly those conditions: thermal mass to buffer heat, courtyards that create cool microclimates, cross-ventilation, deep porticoes for shade, elevated foundations. In reinforced concrete, the same strategies cut mechanical cooling in California while producing a non-combustible envelope.
A My Villa is engineered to be insurable by design. Built in reinforced concrete with a non-combustible envelope, ember-resistant openings, a Class A roof and Zone 0 defensible space, it satisfies the 2026 WUI Code, the 12-measure Safer from Wildfires framework, and IBHS Wildfire Prepared Home Plus at once — the standards admitted carriers use to underwrite and discount. Comparable wood-frame homes are increasingly pushed to the FAIR Plan or surplus-lines market.
In California marketing the terms blur, but they are different. "Mediterranean" usually names a stucco-and-tile aesthetic. The Italian villa, as we build it, is a rigorous typology — clarity of form, proportion, spatial hierarchy, architecture integrated with landscape — drawn from Villa Adriana, Villa Medici and Villa La Rotonda and reinterpreted in contemporary reinforced concrete, not reproduced as pastiche.
In most cases yes. Post-2025 California rebuild provisions streamline permit pathways for homes lost in declared disasters, and reinforced concrete's native code compliance removes much of the specialty sub-assembly work that slows wood-frame rebuilds. Coastal-zone parcels remain subject to California Coastal Commission review; our pre-validated structural system and engineering partners are built for that complexity.
Currently accepting a limited number of California commissions for 2026–2027. A briefing begins with a site visit, a structural feasibility review, and a site-specific insurance positioning analysis — led personally by our founding partner.
Prefer email? Write to info@myvilla.laOur founding partner will personally respond within 48 hours with next steps for your private briefing.