The Basilica of Santo Spirito is one of the most evocative places in Florence. Designed by Brunelleschi in the heart of the Florentine Oltrarno, it is recognizable for its very particular and bare façade. White, smooth and completely plastered. A manifesto of the elegance of rigor evoked by the project of PvS House: a renovation of an apartment overlooking the church signed by AFSa study. The team of architects, composed of Antonio Acocella And Pietro Seghi he concentrated on recovering the original consistency of the house, compromised, over the years, by reckless subdivisions and modifications, and to do so he resorted to a total revision of the layout of the house, focusing on a very specific objective: satisfying the needs of living contemporary of one young family without neglecting the dialogue with the genius loci.
The new distribution structure of the house reveals a clear division between the living area and the sleeping area. L’living area it was deliberately located in the more spacious rooms, also characterized by better views, while the more private spaces of the house, i.e. the bedrooms, were concentrated in the quietest and most intimate part. The articulated spatial configuration of the living area, achieved through the creation of large openings in the existing walls, presents itself as a fluid sequence of rooms, visually connected through a studied arrangement of the openings which triggers a dynamic play of perspective views, capable of transforming the serial iteration of the individual rooms (kitchen, dining room and living room) in a single living experience, underlined by the continuity of the grit flooring which acts as a real connection.
The sleeping area includes three bedrooms and three bathrooms, articulated around the introverted cloister. Here the grit flooring gives way to the soft shades of teak and the warm nuances of microcement. But the real protagonist role of the project is entrusted to the white plaster that covers the shell of the house, converting the walls into white backdrops of a rarefied scenography, in which the furnishings (few, essential and necessary) take on the appearance of discreet guests , entered on tiptoe to make room for space. It is the embodiment of the elegance of rigor we were talking about earlier when referring to the façade of the Church of Santo Spirito. Transported into the domestic dimension, it becomes the vector of a contemporary language which derives, as the authors of the project stated, from continuity with tradition and its rewriting through specific interventions of formal and material abstraction.
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Author’s interior design guides
Taschen 100 Interiors Around the World
Taschen Design from the 20th century
RETROSUPERFUTURE Entries of Milan. Milan entrances
Taschen 100 Contemporary Houses
Roman architect animated by an innate cosmopolitan vocation and an unbridled curiosity, he considers design his personal magnifying glass to interpret the flow of social and cultural changes crossing the new millennium. He alternates his love for planning with his passion for storytelling, in the belief that the word can help unravel the intricate dynamics of the creative process. Always interested in interior design and the connections between communication and architecture, he deals with the relationships between space and image, working on the intersection between fashion, food, art and interiors.
