Casa in Villa
Casa in Villa is a complete demolition and reconstruction of a residential building in Sammichele di Bari, Puglia. The project replaces low-quality construction on a 354 sqm lot with a courtyard house organised around a central void — fully private, open to the sky, invisible from the street. On the adjacent lot, the same studio completed another house in 2013.
Casa in Villa is a complete demolition and reconstruction of a residential building in Sammichele di Bari, a small town in Puglia, southern Italy. The lot sits across from the town's public garden, in a residential block typical of southern Italian borghi — dense, low-rise, and largely saturated by construction of no architectural value. The existing single-storey buildings occupied the entire plot, offering no open space, no natural light to the interior, and no relationship with the street.
Clearing the site made it possible to build at its centre what did not exist before: a void. The internal courtyard, fully private and invisible from the street, occupies roughly half the lot area and constitutes the spatial device around which the whole dwelling is organised. The building houses two residential units, one per floor, sharing a single entrance and a common courtyard.
At ground level a longitudinal axis connects the entrance to the living area in continuous visual contact with the courtyard through full-height glazing. The relationship between interior and exterior is reversed with respect to the street: the public front is compact and restrained, while toward the courtyard everything opens — white walls, glazing, and the projecting first floor creating a shaded zone below.
The street facade is composed of two volumes. A taller volume is articulated into three horizontal bands determined by the incremental increase in wall thickness toward the top. A lower white volume covers the ground-floor living area. The base is clad in painted galvanised steel sheet panels, fabricated to drawing by a local blacksmith. The structure is reinforced concrete with cellular concrete block infill and EPS insulation. Flooring throughout is honed lava stone. Aluminium thermal-break window frames with integrated Griesser shutters match the facade colour.
On the adjacent lot, the studio completed Casa PS in 2013, also through demolition and reconstruction. Two interventions on the same urban block, twelve years apart, that begin to redefine a piece of residential fabric — tangible evidence that radical, incremental renewal is a viable path for small southern Italian towns.
