VISION QUEST

Architect Raffaella Bortoluzzi of Labo Design Studio conjures a sublime retreat for serious art collectors on eastern Long Island

- VICKY LOWRY

It's hard to put a label on Raffaella Bortoluzzi's architectural style. In addition to her other designs, Bortoluzzi-who was born in Venice and helms the New York architectural firm Labo Design Studio-has crafted a wavy zinc-clad vacation home for the arts philanthropist Maja Hoffmann that juts up like a sculpture from the jungled hillside of Mustique. She fashioned a jaunty multicolor modernist box for decorator Muriel Brandolini's Hamptons getaway. She infused the New York branch of luxury jeweler Pomellato with full-out Deco glamour. Her own Little Italy apartment, with its custom-made blackened-steel kitchen, is an ode to minimalist industrial chic. "It's very difficult in a culture like ours, where everything is imitated, to have a confidence in your own hand, as Raffaella has," recalled the late architect Rafael Viñoly, for whom Bortoluzzi worked after earning a master's degree from Columbia University's graduate school of architecture. "She possesses a strange and wonderful combination of Italian sensitivity and strict New York training. She has a sound signature but it's not connected to a stylistic trend."