A normal house.

A typical distributive system of the 70s.
A client holding a lease.

Total renovation.
A constraint: applying minimum planimetric distribution.
A demand: positioning and reviewing some family period furnishings.

 

 

A bet (at planning stage): revealing the identity of the single rooms (intimate space) to a hypothetical passage (shareable space).

These are the requirements for a house, about 90 square meters + a 150 square meter garden, in the Casal Palocco area (Rome): serial since belonging to the terraced typology but at the same time unique, with an identity of its own (a home is always marked by the identity of the people living in it). The distribution of the apartment is canonical and it takes place into four sections, which can be double assembled:

 

 

 

 

After passing by the entrance, the perception of light and white, a powerful receiver than any other color, from walls, doors, present furnishings contrasts with the dull grey resin, of the route-corridor, as if to simulate "the asphalt of a road" (an optical effect doubled by the mirror on the wall). The rhythm and color - neutral, if any, and lightly outlined - are drawn from a contemporary panelling, made of polished glass, which partially covers the rooms (a blue-greyish color space for the services area and olive-greyish for those which are served), and then turning towards the corridor to whom it reveals, behind closed doors, the essence (the content / function); treatment is not an end in itself but for reporting the numerous built-in sliding doors. Doors are white and oversize (2.70 m), opened, when not used, they completely disappear, somehow evoking a sense of lightness and linearity, sometimes, unexpected and unusual. The diaphragm-kitchen door, completely transparent, can scroll until being close up and never interrupt the continuity of the vision continuity with the living room, deck and adjacent garden, remembering that "mangiare è una cosa seria" > eat is serious matter!

 

Family furnishings, including one for each environment, positioned to be mirrored, reflected and reviewed, through light and matter, are told with humor. The glass paneling, visible from every spot around the house, therefore, remains a link that communicates spatial continuity through visual references: interior/ interior, interior/exterior. Matter, glass in the interior/peperino in the exterior, creates a contrast through the relative behavior with light: light-heavy, bright-opaque, reflecting-absorbing; natural finishing touchs integrated with artificial ones (durmast parquet, resin), straight lines on the plan and section (sliding doors, two-coloured glass panelling, baseboards), continuous flooring, increase the sense of exceeding in between single environments, in which reflection and opacity remain alive besides care for details, refusing any sort of ornamental sign.

The desire is about giving equilibrium and a wish for comfort to remain engraved on our mind.