House Design Which Blends Traditional Charm With Contemporary Flair

The countryside of upper Salento is characterized by rolling hills and thousand-year-old olive trees, often of great value and of considerable size. This is the context in which this house was built, a plot of land in the countryside between Carovigno and Ostuni, surrounded by dry stone walls and dotted with olive trees with large foliage that filter the clear, sharp light of the south onto the red Apulian earth. Nothing more, but certainly enough to consider it the ideal place to build a home surrounded by nature, as desired by the customers who have been looking for it for over a year, imagining their retreat there. Their requests were simple: a house in an intimate place where they could retreat to rest, but also where they could work away from the city. A house where you could feel at one with the surrounding environment, and which was self-sufficient.

The idea was therefore to create a sort of fluid and “diffuse” house, with undefined but open spaces (apart from the sleeping area block), in continuity with the external environment, where the gaze could always find the greenery that, in a sort of embrace, surrounds the house.

As in all my works created in contexts like this, I have always thought that building a house in the midst of nature was, in a certain sense, committing an act of violence, causing a wound that had to be healed in a sort of reconciliation with nature. itself, giving back to it what was taken from it. The project should therefore first of all have respected the place, without uprooting a single tree, on the contrary considering them not only an essential constraint, but an integral element of the project. In fact, it is the trees that provide the house with protection from the prevailing winds and summer solar radiation, providing the necessary shading to avoid overheating of the surfaces, filtering the light delicately and leaving the air free to circulate naturally and delicately inside the house. interior of the environments.

The volumes are simple and recall traditional, elementary and compact shapes, although articulated in such a way as to follow the shadows and empty spaces defined by the trees. The materials are traditional, white lime plaster and dry-laid stone walls from the excavations used to build the building, thus reusing the material obtained from the same site. The large glass openings to the south are protected by the branches of the olive trees, while those exposed to the sun’s rays are compact and very thick, made of stone to have maximum thermal inertia: they accumulate heat during the day, slowly releasing it during the night.

This design approach allows, to a certain extent, a reconciliation with the natural environment, but also provides answers to one of the clients’ requests: to have a house that is as self-sufficient as possible. Thus the house consumes little energy, and the little it consumes is renewable energy coming from the photovoltaic and solar panels positioned on the roof. Rainwater is recovered and stored in a cistern and subsequently reused to irrigate the land and flush toilets.

The colors of the surfaces are natural ones, of the same materials used in the construction: lime and white stone from Ostuni. The external floor is in smooth and waxed natural concrete, the light hazelnut color of the stone with which the large south wall was built, while the pool area is in white sandblasted stone so as not to accumulate heat. The internal walls are covered with light gray pigmented lime mortar spread by hand in a material way, to reduce the glare of the sun’s rays entering in the afternoon hours and absorb the light without reflecting it. Most of the furnishings, from the living room sofa to the beds, are made of masonry, while the rest of the custom-made furnishings are designed and made by local artisans in brown oak wood and natural iron, such as the kitchen and the dining table.

In addition to the “indoor” environments, several “outdoor” environments have been created to fully enjoy the surrounding environment, as requested by customers. In a sort of “widespread” house, therefore, some outdoor rooms were created: a living room with a fireplace created in the stone wall, a kitchen created in an ancient animal enclosure, as well as a relaxation and reading area in a “secret” garden enclosed by ancient dry stone walls, finally a dining area with a concrete table on a concrete platform under the shade of a large olive tree. These spaces also respond to the logic of integration between the artificial and natural environments, and become an integral part of the architecture and landscape itself.

Project Name: A House in the Green
Architects: Luca Zanaroli – https://www.lucazanaroli.com/
Location: Carovigno, Italy
Year: 2023
House Photography: Nathalie Craig

#housedesign #homedesign #house #home