Villa Barberina | Paolo Bornello

Villa Barberina is a small eighteenth-century Venetian villa in size with the proportions of a large sixteenth-century Venetian villa: meaning that it has its own diminutive monumentality, completed over time with the addition of the stables in the back and the nineteenth-century crenellated towers on the sides. The architecture thus appears as a sequence of progressive stratifications that are overlaid without eliminating the previous layer. The same is true of the interiors, which appear as a stratification of life experiences: furniture and decorations from different eras, different lives and different countries. The type of restoration work that was put into practice began with these stratifications, consolidating them by eliminating the incoherent elements and integrating them with new parts that de facto become one more life experience in which each part carefully relates to the existing building: the swimming pool turns into a typical terraced stone manure trough, the new stair is hidden behind the bookcase as if it were a secret passage, the furniture and fabrics create intimate domestic atmospheres.