The single-family house on an individual plot is the most widespread and least examined building type in Italy's Northeast. Casa Armadillo occupies an 837-square-metre remnant, long and narrow, left over by land subdivision and squeezed between existing buildings: one third buildable, two thirds agricultural.

The project starts from limits rather than from a figure. The envelope of setbacks, heights and regulations leaves a minimal field of action: everything must fit on a single level. The result is a linear gabled prism, slightly bent at its midpoint. The bend turns the house away from the neighbours' views and creates a joint that becomes the heart of the home, arranged around the fireplace. Living and sleeping areas sit at either end. Two loggias carved out of the mass provide sheltered outdoor space without adding volume and screen direct sunlight.

A continuous skin of clay tiles wraps roof and walls, erasing the boundary between roof and façade. The system, the tuiles de bardage of Normandy and the Loire, works as a ventilated façade and is transposed here into a landscape where terracotta is the material of vernacular building. Same tile, same build-up, same bottom-up laying sequence on roof and wall alike. Complexity is concentrated in the metalwork: bayonet joints form the frames that define every edge of the monolith.

Inside, the timber roof structure is left exposed, tracing in negative the profile of the folded prism. Two steps follow the slope of the ground and lower the sleeping area. Light enters from the sides through carefully measured openings; the living area extends into the kitchen garden.

An ordinary plot, a modest budget and a minimal domestic brief, treated as design material: protection as form, constraint as measure, a single material taken all the way.