ENRICO
Enrico is the ideal client that all architects would like to meet at least once in their life: crazy enough to personally (and at any cost) realize the ideas he falls in love with, but also rational enough to obsessively seek the meaning of the entire project.
THE RUSTIC
A small cottage in the middle of a meadow becomes the dream to live in for Enrico. From the outside, the cottage is beautiful as it is, to be preserved, but the interior must be transformed into a comfortable and welcoming functional home. On the ground floor there is a stable with wooden feeders on the sides. On the first floor a barn with the floor still covered with straw.
The original interior spaces are kept as much as possible: a large living area with a stone vault on the ground floor and a comfortable sleeping area with a pitched roof on the first floor. Only a new internal staircase and a new bathroom change the space we found. Then there is the new cellar, completely underground and built upstream of the cottage by reusing the boulders that emerged during the excavations.
THE WOOD
The architectural idea is very simple: insert a new, recognizable container, completely covered with chestnut wood, into the existing farmhouse. The new volume adapts to the contours of the existing stone envelope and may one day be completely dismantled to convert the building back to what it was.
Chestnut wood covers all that is new and becomes the absolute protagonist of the hut. Chosen, modeled, stuck, nailed, oiled, transformed into cladding, into furniture, simply “used” for three long years by Enrico, who, to make his dream come true, improvises himself as an extraordinary carpenter.
The chestnut wood on the first floor covers the walls and the pitched ceiling, becomes a door, a handle, a niche, a retractable door, it transforms into a storage hatch and a compartment to house the tatamis. On the ground floor it covers the long bench and the long kitchen counter that ideally take the place of the old mangers. It becomes a table, bench back and kitchen riser but also an isolated wall against the cold stone masonry.
WINDOWS
The new windows, also rigorously made of chestnut wood, do not modify the existing masonry but deliberately oversized and staggered with respect to the original openings are integrated into the new wooden walls. From the outside, the new large windows keep the image of the hut unchanged but from the inside, conceived as paintings, they frame, first glimpses of the stone masonry of the old hut, then the extraordinary landscape of the Orco Valley.
