This two families house presents a traditional local scheme of ‘row house’, introvert on the street and open on the back garden. The central rooms, living and dining areas, suffered great lack of light, due to their distance from the two facades. All rooms present vaulted masonry ceilings, very valuable for their architecture and space effect. This scheme imposes the preservation of the enfilade of vaulted spaces, yet it urges a strategy to avoid the ‘box in box’ effect and extend multiple internal flows and views.
In order to achieve this effect of openness and space interconnection, we use the ‘arch’ archetype and apply it in a playful unconventional way. We open several arches, different in size, either as ‘internal windows’ or to merge entire rooms into each other. The final effect contributes to lighten the masonry structure, offering many interconnected perspectives that make the spaces breath, lightened by plenty of natural light. The masonry becomes lighter, like paper, cut by generous voids. We reduced the palette of materials to very few ones: masonry and stucco for the walls; ‘coccio pesto’ for the floors (a local mix of hydraulic mortar and terracotta grit poured on site); onyx travertine for the other surfaces. Travertine is applied either in its natural state, or coated with a transparent resin, in order to preserve the visual irregularity of its texture. The final effect wills to recreate a sort of ‘rustic , thrifty, somehow austere’ atmosphere, achieved by using innovative applications for traditional materials.
