La casa sull'Albero

The family needed space: three children and a dog friend are synonymous with vitality, growth and a future that needs new places to welcome it. The house they bought was a precious promise of their desires: space to rest, to work, to play, to hide away, to curl up, to live. The goal of this renovation was exactly that: create space and generate comfort to host and nurture all this vitality. Even when a home doesn’t offer a large floor area, there is always a way to create space. For  example by letting space in from outside, with large openings which reduce the boundary between interior and exterior, allowing light to filter in and shift with the rhythm of the day. big windows were the 

beginning of an aesthetic metamorphosis, but also the kitchen, which flows naturally in the garden outside through a raised patio where it is possible to have meals during the good season. The garden, a reserved and intimate angle, also isolated from the city noise, thanks to his position and the surrounding greenery, becomes part of the house, or perhaps the house becomes part of the garden, who can say?

 

 

 

 

Our shared responsibility was to embrace the family’s desire for open space. The comfort of a house built to measure the desires, needs and lifestyle of those who live there. 

 

A success for us was also achieving excellent energy performance despite a limited budget, making the sustainability choice an accessible choice for a family that entrusted us.

One of the most serious issues in the original building was the high level of moisture on the ground floor, caused by the clay soil beneath the foundation. the moisture has consumed the walls, ruined plasters and compromised the flooring.  With the skilled and patient support of the construction team, we made the bold choice to literally cut through the load-bearing walls and insert a waterproof barrier to block rising damp. This, together with the creation of the ventilated crawl space under the floor, was the most important restoration intervention of the whole project.

To convert the attic into a habitable space, we needed to meet very high energy efficiency standards, as required by regulations when changing the use of a space (from non-residential to residential). For this reason our first design exceeded the family's available budget, as it included an external insulation system that would wrap the entire building. But thanks to another form of collaboration trust we found new solutions. It was the construction company that suggested some clever alternatives, for example instead of demolishing interior concrete walls to create the new wiring, we used drywall partitions in which let pass the systems. This created an opportunity to insulate without excessive costs, filling those cavities with cellulose insulation.

Also for the roof insulation was used this material that, as all natural materials, have an excellent performance in summer conditions: It warms slowly, dampening the impact of daytime heat and keeping the space cool throughout the day, postponing until the evening, when windows can be opened, any residual warmth entrance.

As the seasons change, the family continues to share their satisfaction for the intervention: during summer they enjoyed the cool without installing air  conditioning, with autumnal rains and now with winter cold they feel the comfort and wellbeing of a natural solution: “we feel cocooned”, they told us.