CASA EMME
In the heart of Trieste, within an early twentieth-century building, the project intervenes on an apartment whose original layout remains legible, reinterpreting its logic to accommodate contemporary living.
The original plan—three rooms in sequence, a separate kitchen, and fragmented service areas—reflected a compartmentalized domestic model. The intervention works through reconnection, identifying key points of transformation within the circulation.
The primary gesture is the opening between kitchen and living room, creating a new social and spatial core. The central island becomes both a functional and social anchor, while a system of walnut and fluted glass sliding doors introduces a movable threshold: a filter of light and a spatial device capable of modulating continuity and separation.
The reorganization of the service areas redefines the domestic hierarchy. The addition of an en suite bathroom and the reconfiguration of the existing bath clarify degrees of privacy, while the introduction of a laundry and storage area—screened by a walnut-framed partition with a translucent transom—maintains visual permeability and material coherence.
Keeping all spaces on a single level preserves spatial continuity. The integration of low-profile construction systems allows for the addition of new finishes and walk-in showers without interrupting the perception of the historic flooring.
Service areas such as the kitchen and bathrooms become tactile, material moments within the domestic sequence, each element defined by materials, color, and detail, reinforcing identity without breaking the spatial flow. The continuous baseboards integrate systems and furniture, while the flooring reinterprets typological tradition in a contemporary register. In the kitchen, a two-tone checkerboard establishes a vibrant but controlled field; in the bathrooms, the material presence is more compact, with color defining the atmosphere.
Custom millwork strengthens compositional coherence. Walnut cabinets with integrated pulls dialogue with the large living room bookshelf—a lightweight system of tubular steel uprights and adjustable shelves that introduces a subtle tension between structure and material lightness.
Lighting completes the spatial composition, defining perceptual hierarchies and guiding the transition between communal areas and more intimate spaces.
The preservation of the historic woodwork and original parquet consolidates the dialogue with the pre-existing structure. The project does not impose itself on the building; rather, it calibrates its latent potential, establishing a measured balance between memory and transformation.
