Everyone owns their own island
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Everyone owns their own island
The family at the heart of the project
Sometimes market logics have nothing to do with the economic aspect, the landscape or the proximity to the city services. There are priorities strongly emerging in the life of a family and inevitably leading to important choices, sometimes unpredictably. Our clients for example have put the family in front of everything, and this choice has thrown a series of design constraints that have been useful in outlining the limits of our project. We explain better. The family that commissioned the work consists of two only child, owners of a medium-sized business, who decided, to stay close to the elderly parents and not to eradicate the two teenage children from their circle of friends, by completing the transformation of an apartment in a working-class area of Turin.
What is a second choice for many families has become for them the first, provided that they turn it into their lifetime home.
The requests are clear, they require a large living area where they can gather together, a main bedroom with a walk-in closet and a larger double room for the children.
At the design level, we had full design freedom, we could demolish and rebuild everything, just as we wanted. But we decided otherwise. Our first idea was to maintain the original structure of the apartment in order not to erase its origins, so that the owners, who grew up in the same neighbourhood, could recognize in the new home some aspects of their childhood homes. But we decided to pamper them a little, adding an en-suite bathroom to their room, accessible only to them. We proposed to bathe little bigger, for the use of the boys and the guests. We gave priority to light colors in order to amplify the ambient lighting from the south openings. We decided to replace all the windows with new more thermally efficient ones, and we also decided to insert a system of mechanized ventilation with heat recovery, as it is not always good to eliminate the air draft in an old not thermally insulated house.
The wall colours are from Farrow and Ball, because in addition to the aesthetic aspect, they provide a more comfortable experience even to the touch, appearing in fact more velvety. To amplify this feeling of “warmth” we chose a wooden floor for the whole apartment. Ventilation and air conditioning systems have been hidden in the ceiling void, which have also housed all the “technical” lights, such as spotlights and LED strips.
In the corridor leading to the night area, left deliberately free from furnishing, has been lined the main wall with 3 slabs in stoneware size 120 x 240 cm, which amplifies the feeling of linearity of the entire apartment.
The merit of the project’s success, has depended entirely on the clients, who have given us the opportunity to better understand their vision of life, and in some way have allowed us to make it a bit our own.
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