Villa Al Pasha was built in line with a wealthy commissioner’s wishes: a luxury holyday home in Bardolino, a stunningly beautiful location on Lake Garda, Italy. The villa was built on a massive rock basement. Only the glazed façade and a white metal beam can be seen from the bottom of the hill, as the building has been designed to blend into the surrounding landscape despite its dimensions. The indoor spaces have also been planned with the greatest care, to allow the visitors a wonderful view of Lake Garda.
LOCATION Villa Al Pasha sits on Bardolino’s morainic hills, overlooking the beautiful Lake Garda and offering a breathtaking view of the lake shores of Veneto and Lombardy, the two regions divided by the lake. The unmatchable landscape of Lake Garda has charmed foreign visitor for centuries and is now the perfect setting for the villa, a wealthy businessman’s holiday home. The elegant building is surrounded by a vast garden filled with lush vegetation. Villa Al Pasha was built over the ruins of a previous building, demolished in order to be rebuilt bigger and better. The project (Piano Casa) allowed to expand the original size of the house not only without interfering with the surrounding natural environment, but also fully respecting it. The refined design of Villa Al Pasha also allows its visitors to enjoy a surprising visual and emotional experience.
THE PROJECT The building follows the lay of the land: what can be seen from the foothills is only a glazed parallelepiped sitting on a base made of huge local stones. The building is deeply rooted to the ground, thanks to the staircases built on the two sides of the house. A white steel beam holds together the lower ground floor – where the living room is located – and connects it to the glass walls of the ground floor. The cross section of the project shows its elegant simplicity: the bedrooms are on the ground floor, and below the living room are two further underground floors, with a wellness/fitness area, extra rooms for the guests and a basement. A skylight well runs around the house, bursting with sumptuous vegetation: it is a sort of trait d’union between the different spaces of the building while light and fresh air run through it.
THE INDOOR SPACES The whole project revolves around the indoor spaces, that have been designed to melt with the outer landscape. The big living room has two wide sliding glass walls – 15 metres in total – that hide into the stone walls and make the whole room become part of the landscape: the dark floor of the living room – made using Farsena stone – connects it to a magnificent terrace above the beautiful Lake Garda. The bedrooms and the bathrooms on the first floor open up onto the immensity of the landscape, thanks to big windows and mirrors. The pure white indoor walls and the exquisite finishing – made of wood, stone, glass, steel – create an extremely refined atmosphere and allow to give a personal touch to some of the rooms, such as the main bedroom and the library. Next to the main building there is a refined wine cellar, built with the greatest care to insure the ideal microclimate to the owner’s collection of valuable wines. A section of the wine cellar – whose onyx tiled floor is retro-illuminated – is reserved to wine tasting.
SUSTAINABILITY The whole project modified a pre-existent building. Its complexity required a remarkable effort both in terms of planning and of realization sur le champ. In particular, in each room of this extraordinary house a sophisticated climate control system and a complex domotic system are utilised. The illumination system design adds a further glint of elegance to the whole building. The wide garden surrounding the house (over 30 hectares) allows the perfect balance between natural and artificial elements, thanks to an important reforestation of the hill and to its lush vegetation.
