The vineyard house
The project intervention consists briefly in the demolition and reconstruction on site with merging into a single building.
The project involves the construction of a two-storey dwelling house and a small tool shed.
The basement tool shed is not communicating with the house and is located in a central area with respect to the vineyard and the olive grove. Only the south elevation is above ground and opens onto the largest cultivated strip.
The house was instead placed on the upper strip, precisely in correspondence with the pre-existing building, because the location of the old volume is already optimal and because the project does not intend to overturn the original logic of use of the site: here the path already converges. access and from here you can control the entire property, from a privileged position for exposure, view and accessibility.
Keeping the intent of not altering the landscape balance and not burdening the impact of the building on the site, the project envisages breaking the available volume into 2 smaller adjacent parts rather than merging everything into a single geometric solid of too large dimensions.
It is therefore envisaged the construction of a 2-storey building having formal, dimensional and typological characteristics completely similar to the one that existed here and a lateral extension to the west, not very visible because it is low, basement and emptied on the only elevation above ground with a large opening towards the bottom below.
The typological and constructive characteristics go in the direction of maximum adherence to the context and the minimum space possible.
• Simplicity of forms and silence: the parallelepiped, partially buried on the north side, is entirely clad in local stone with a horizontal layering texture and externally presents evident analogies with the rustic ruins typical of the Ligurian hills, thanks also to the parsimonious sizing of the openings , the absence of windows or external shading systems and the expedient of keeping the pitches of the roof hidden by the perimeter walls.
• Volume integrated into the ground profile: in addition to having the same planimetric location as the pre-existing volume, the house in the project also has the same elevation level as the ground floor and identical position of the access door.
The additional lateral volume, as we have already said, will be semi-buried: the south side open and dematerialized towards the valley, the east side adjacent to the main volume, the north side entirely against the ground and the west side partially buried. The flat roof will be partly used as a terrace with pergola and will rise slightly higher than the level of the rear band.
The internal distribution system immediately surrounding the house offers a game of levels typical of the rural architecture of our hinterland: going down through the small pine forest you reach the house from the north, on a strip with 3 smaller trees, then you go down the external ladder which leads to the lawn east of the ground floor and you enter the house. From the inside, the living room opens towards the south-west on an existing strip of about 5 m deep. From here you can choose whether to go down again, with a typical parallel staircase, towards the vineyard and the olive grove, or whether to go up towards the intermediate belt to the west and then towards the terrace with pergola.
Thanks to these distribution and “arrangement” choices of the volume on the site, excavations and the need to build external walls will be reduced to a minimum.
• Maintenance of all the trees and of the agricultural land: in addition to not foreseeing the cutting of any plants, the project is part of a general work of recovery of the agricultural land carried out by the client for some years. Of the 5.3 hectares of property, about 2/5 are planted with vineyards and olive groves with the presence of more than 100 olive trees (mainly located in the southern part of the land) and about 5,000 m² of Vermentino vineyard (around the house planned on the north-west, west and south sides).
We can say that this property plays a role of "garrison", since it constitutes a virtuous example of use of the land and not of abuse of the same, given that the 53,000 square meters are partly cultivated and partly maintained with the naturalistic structure of area, without overbuilding and without land use.
The selection of project materials is limited to local exposed stone, corten steel for cladding and pergola, glass and natural painted wood for windows.
