Home with a view

In the Crocetta district, just a stone’s throw from the centre of Turin, a flat with a panoramic view located on the top floor of an apartment block built in the 1970s has recently been lovingly refurbished by Italia and Partners.

The original layout had a poor spatial design with a series of small, closed rooms, long corridors and a hall that blocked the view of the lounge, whose dimension and shape were limited and impractical.

In fact, this is where the refurbishment project started. First the hall was eliminated, which recovered a considerable amount of space and opened up the living area into a spacious, light comfortable room with a spectacular panoramic view.

The load-bearing columns in the centre of the room create an ideal division between the lounge and the entrance, and here the designers have deliberately created a gallery-like atmosphere to enhance the owners’ prestigious art collection, which includes eighteenth century icons and works by seventeenth century Flemish painters and nineteenth century French and Italian artists. These artworks are displayed alongside designer furniture and other objets d’art that have been collected over the years.

In this area, Palco (Ø 37) projectors fitted on two parallel, ceiling-recessed low voltage tracks have been used to light the art collection.

Directly opposite each other, on either side of the lounge, there is a study and a dining room. The partition area between the living and dining rooms has been fitted with twin-sided niches that house artefacts illuminated by recessed Laser Blade luminaires.

The colour scheme for the entire house consists of a range of sand, beige and ivory tones, but the study and dining room feature a distinctive light blue that creates a clear contrast and evokes attractive graphic effects. The overall design has been created to enhance both the historic furniture distributed throughout the house, like the nineteenth century bookcase and the Louis XVI desk in the study, and the owners’ art collection, which includes Natuchè African ivory pieces, elephants and bells collected over almost half a century. There are also a number of late eighteenth century Benin heads located in the niches in the entrance area, which interact beautifully with the refurbisment project’s minimalist mood.

In the northern area of the apartment there is a large kitchen designed around a central island with a dining table and classic Eames Vitra chairs, all lit by Laser Blade luminaires recessed in black niches in the ceiling.

In the master bedroom (40 sqm), the built-in wardrobes have been kept, but they have been restored and decorated with Hermés wallpaper. Two late nineteenth century inginocchiatoi are positioned on either side of the bed and the walls are adorned with a small collection of family mirrors from different periods.

The en-suite bathroom is decorated with light limestone slabs and a grazing effect Laser Blade luminaire has been installed under the large mirror to highlights its texture.