Casa di Cristina

Here we created a living area with a kitchen and dining room, a living room with a fireplace and welcoming entrance. We wanted the heart of the home to be open, harmonious, and functional. To achieve this, we replaced a bulky concrete pillar with a slender iron one, while maintaining structural solidity, it allowed the space to be lightened and a visual connection to be created between the different areas of the living area. We also included a multi-purpose room designed to evolve with the family’s passions: a true domestic workshop that can function as a studio, hobby room, or pantry depending on who’s using it. Upstairs, the night area was reimagined to provide a desire of autonomy and privacy of our clients: now each child has their own bedroom, complemented by two bathrooms. The redesign of the spaces also generated unexpected opportunities. Before our intervention, the apartment had no outdoor space. However, now, with the living area on the ground floor, we have access to a small garden: a new haven of peace that offers constant refreshment during the warmer months, creating a new connection between the home's interior and exterior.

We didn’t stop at simply reconfiguring the spaces; we wanted to ensure the highest possible living comfort for the family. For this reason, a significant energy requalification operation was carried out, while keeping our customers' economic needs in mind. We began by identifying the most problematic surfaces: the ground floor suffered from rising damp, and the first-floor ceiling, adjacent to the uninsulated attic, lacked adequate thermal protection. This meant cold, damp spaces in winter and excessive heat in summer. To address this, we raised the attic floor by about 22 cm, creating a cavity filled with blown-in recycled paper cellulose, a natural material offering excellent thermal insulation. To combat rising damp, we built a ventilated crawl space and added an insulating layer to provide, also thanks to the underfloor heating, dry, comfortable interiors. All windows and doors were replaced with high-performance wood-aluminum frames, offering improved thermal and acoustic insulation. The electrical and plumbing systems were completely redone on the ground floor, as they were already present on the first floor. We followed a similar approach for the heating system, as the goal was to add new spaces to the apartment without disrupting the existing ones. For this purpose, it was essential to use a hybrid heating system, so that it could work efficiently with both the underfloor heating on the ground floor and the radiators already present on the first floor. Even without external insulation (thermal cladding), these solutions allow us to reduce thermal dispersion, achieve good  performance (the house has moved up to Energy Class B), and enhance the overall comfort and wellbeing of the household—at an optimized cost.