The project was initially conceived as the philological restoration of an early twentieth-century single-family home and its garden, located on a hill just outside the historic city center. During the restoration, the clients also requested that the design project be extended to the interiors and the furniture.

The opportunity therefore lay open for a homogeneous and contemporary design of the restoration and the style.

The approach to the design and research therefore took this opportunity to question the concept of domesticity: in other words, to sound out the potential for matching the layers of the client’s life experience with the genius loci, by bringing together objects, colors, materials, and interior situations belonging to even very distant figurative codes, but bound together by the fil rouge of the inhabitant’s life experiences (though an effort was made to avoid a mannerist eclecticism or musty conformism).

The references chosen for the design and methodology derive from the tradition of Anglo-Saxon interior design (the dressed-up home; permanent and moveable furniture as the home’s garment) and the peculiar freedom and vitality of some of Gio Ponti’s interiors (the concept of decorated home and the return to traditional furniture systems: casa Marmont and Villa Areazza).

The building develops over three floors with a frontal outdoor stairway that leads directly into the main entrance and to the living area on the piano nobile. Then the lobby leads down to the ground floor (kitchen and dining room), to the third floor by means of the main staircase (bedrooms) and to the back (veranda and secret garden). The garden is terraced and presents elements typical of the period (gazebo with a trellis, hidden fountains, columns, color study for the flowers and the essences, etc.).

The user’s life experience is represented by his personal desire to have a formal home that is neither institutional nor classic, but welcoming, only for friends, and that could represent his nature as a curious traveler, a luxurious but not excessive home.