After some months of silence, after the grapes harvest and the wine bottling, we have decided it was time to publish some updated photographs we have been shooting on the site of this house on the hills near Piacenza that we have designed for a couple of small wine producers.

As the construction process developed, we realized that our feeling of ‘ownership’ progressively decreased through a (sometimes painful) passage that will soon deliver the building from our hands to the ones of the inhabitants. In the same way, the decisions we now have to face are less and less related to the organization of space, light and… architecture, but rather dictated by clients taste, practical needs and… unexplainable obsessions. It is perhaps in this transition, and because this ‘suspension’, that is possible to find the right moments to shoot, look at and share our photographs without caring too much about things that are still too unfinished, or things that will soon be too defined and characterized…

Construction of boundary walls

Construction of the roof

Construction of the roof

Construction of the roof

Covering the roof

Cladding the boundary walls

Cladding the boundary walls

Cladding the boundary walls

Cladding the boundary walls

The Northern facade

The Northern facade

Looking South through the house

Looking South through the house

Interior view of the upper floor

Looking North through the house

Interior view of the ground floor

The Southern porch

The North-Eastern corner

Brickwork

Brickwork

previous posts about this project:

Bricks from scratch

The Harvest – Brick from scratch – 2

During the site works of the house with garden and caves, studiometrico was asked to think of possible ways of re-using the ruins of a small existing building that layed adjacent to the main house. The initial task was to insert a very small room for guests without completely filling the hollow volume. Some empty space should have been preserved to bring natural light into the caves below the house turning the ruins of the building into a patio. An early design proposal featured a hanging two storey prefab living unit of 2 by 4 meters. Although this seemed like a convincing solution and an exciting design challenge, a new discovery completely changed the project: another ‘secret’ room was found on the opposite side of the ‘patio’. After long negotiations the small room was purchased by the owner of the house for the given purpose…

Overall plan of the new scheme with the house on the right, the patio in the middle, and the newly discovered room on the left.

In the new design proposal the patio is kept almost untouched: a linear staircase leads up to the guest room which expands and overlook into the the patio through a 3-dimensional light-constructed window. The 12 sqm room has also an independent entrance on the opposite side and is conceived as an essential and compact piece of furniture with a bed, a desk, a cupboard and a small toilet. Two small existing windows look toward the panorama, the existing pitched roof profile is mantained. Although this is an extremely  small project, for the difficult accessibility to the site, for the poor conditions of the existing buildings and for the dangerous position just above unfriendly and steep cliffs, the transformation is going to be quite slow and adventurous. Site works should start next spring, and we’ll keep on posting…

Section through the guest room and the patio

Plan of the guest room and the patio

View from the patio toward the 3-dimensional window

The interior views of the guest room

See previous posts about this project:

House with garden and caves

House with garden and caves – 2

House with garden and caves – 3

We have previously posted here few drawings and images of our first project for a ‘built from scratch’ private house near Piacenza, Italy. The 140 sqm villa is going to be inserted in a 4 hectares hilly terrain partly occupied by our client’s vineyards. Everybody knows that the end of september is the right time for the harvest… and since we have started to work on site a couple of months ago, we thought this was a good time to publish a sequence of the way we have progressed in ‘filling our bucket’.

Tracing the house profile on the ground

On the edge of the crater

steelfixing on the cellar level

pouring the concrete foundations

the cellar walls timber formworks

the concrete ‘bucket’ is built…

ground floor timber formworks

isolation of the cellar walls

gathering grapes and fixing steel

the ‘silted up’ cellar

the predalles slabs set into place

ground floor formworks

previous posts about this project:

Bricks from scratch

After a neverending year of sketches, design, writings, phone calls, meetings, documents and contracts, next week studiometrico is going to go on site with its very first ‘built from scratch’ project. A 140 sqm private house will be located on a hilly terrain nearby Piacenza (70 km south of Milan) and inserted within a group of existing buildings and rural facilities. The house has been designed for a mature couple that loves nature, sustainable energy, wine and… bricks. The house should be completed before summer 2009 and the project should then continue with the realization of a new wine cellar. We are very happy to publish some images and drawings of this project.

Interior views of the house:

Overall plan:

Ground floor plan:

Mezzanine plan:

Sections: