Casa Alkymia
The approach guiding Punto Zero’s restyling intervention for Casa Alkymia — a spacious apartment within a 1930s residential building in Monteverde — focused primarily on establishing harmony between the interior design project and the rationalist language of the architecture, while minimising the fragmentation caused by changes in use over time.
“We reinterpreted the arches of the exterior façade and the rationalist curved forms as recognisable elements within our project,” explain the architects.
Through a series of selective demolitions and reconstructed partitions, Punto Zero developed a new layout tailored to the contemporary needs of the young owner.
Between the living room and the kitchen, a large structural opening was introduced to optimise circulation and enhance the apartment’s visual and light connections.
“And to bring the terrace space ‘inside the home’,” adds Arianna Nobile, partner at Punto Zero.
A plasterboard counter-wall articulated through arches, projections, recesses and curved forms harmonises the windowed walls and the new opening between the kitchen and living area.
“This solution allowed us to visually recede the pre-existing windows, so that their varying proportions and dimensions could coherently fit within a harmonious composition inspired by the language of early 20th-century architecture,” explains Giorgio Marchese.
As in many of the studio’s projects, materials also play an identity-defining role in Casa Alkymia. Terrazzo, in different finishes, colours and grain sizes, was used by Punto Zero to reinterpret traditional terrazzo flooring through the juxtaposition of various compositions and textures.
The connective entrance and kitchen areas, finished with small-format anthracite grey terrazzo tiles with a very fine grain, dialogue with the larger-format living room flooring, characterised by a coarser and more colourful aggregate. These transitions are articulated through brass profiles laid within the thickness of the flooring and paired together — sometimes straight, emphasising the passage between rooms, and at other times forming large curves, as in the corridor areas.
The same material was also used in the bathrooms to clad the showers and masonry washbasin countertops.
Colour represents another defining feature of the project. The team at Blu di Prussia worked closely with the architects from the earliest design stages, creating spaces strongly characterised by their individual functions: powder pink envelops the kitchen walls and ceiling, while a saturated carmine red, combined with black terrazzo flooring, defines a portion of the master bedroom.
“In this way, we created a sort of red box within a pale green box, shaping a hierarchy of spaces in the sleeping area between the bed zone and the small sitting room, much like in traditional suites.”
In the children’s bedroom, blue-toned ceilings interact with the remarkable ceiling heights, making the atmosphere feel more intimate and contained.
Colour is also employed through different finishes: matte in the putty-white surfaces enveloping walls and ceilings; satin and enamel finishes in the living room and cinema room walls and dado bands; and ultra-glossy finishes marking openings and transitions between spaces.
