Private house – Empoli (FI)
Project: 2003 – 2004 – Realization: 2004 – 2005

This is a building located near the center of Empoli, classified as “Artifact of environmental and / or historical – cultural interest” in the municipal planning rules. The building, whose construction can be traced back, presumably, to the early decades of the XXth Century, has been the subject over the years for various construction projects that, however, have not had a significant impact on its specific architectural formal features. Spread over three levels, plus the attic, it includes various destinations such as commercial, office, residential and crafts. The work involved almost exclusively the residential portion and consisted of a series of maintenance works in relation to the apartment on the first floor and to the subdivision of the original unit on the second floor into two separate apartments in addition to the complete reconstruction of the roof and below the floor, at a different height from the primitive one, in order to identify the space at the attic level that is completely ready for use. The house has come to be a small museum in which the owner, a lover and expert collector of works and objects of contemporary design, has collected some of those. They were before in his house on the hills of Florence. The construction project is particularly respectful of the original architecture of which the historical and formal features have been highlighted, with an imposing contemporary language implemented through the use of metal structures to consolidate the new floors and the new roof made of wood and terracotta tiles. There is only one new element, which is the stairs of access to the attic premises. Few clear details were used to build the new interior space: the metal staircase, a painted red wall, wooden beams reinforced with purlins, the polished stone floors, the pink doors.