AM House | Francesca Barbieri

In Varese, an early twentieth-century building, with the “bottega” and colonnade at street level and the workshop and living quarters on the upper floors, is today the subject of a careful modification and redistribution of the interiors, designed to create new residential spaces carefully detailed.

The project is aimed at enhancing the original character and formal elements of the building, such as the stone staircase and its decorative iron parapet, the original fixtures and the ceilings that, in some points, reveal the wooden beams, placing them in relation with a redesign of spaces of a contemporary and minimal style, with simple lines and cuts of clean perspectives.

Furnishings with plastic and geometric shapes come into play, which, together with iconic design elements and hand-made ceramics, are in tune with the new interiors.

Light, an essential element in architecture, is very often a difficult theme to coordinate within buildings in historic centres; here a skylight lets the zenithal light flood part of the house; in the service rooms, glazed cuts create suggestive plays of light like lanterns.