A house in a semicircle

The permeable and usable project

Edoardo Giancola and Federico Zarattini by Zarcola Architetti have designed an easily permeable house by exploiting the pre-existing semicircle shape. By eliminating the internal partitions and positioning all the service areas towards the shaded part of the apartment they created a single continuous bright space. Furthermore, the passages have been designed to ensure easy use: they are designed to be traveled in several directions with circulatory motions and without changes in altitude.

A continuous bookcase defines the rooms of a fluid and luminous house

The cornerstones of the project are therefore the fluid and easy flows of movement within a free plan that allows you to experience the spaces without the need for wall divisions, but by exploiting the particular semicircle shape of the building. A continuous bookcase in wood, which encloses (and hides) inside the service areas , becomes the device spatial distributive that configures and optimizes the layout of the entire house, separating the large and bright main room from the kitchen, TV room, walk-in closet and bathroom, equipped with double access to ensure circular usability.

The exhibition and distribution solutions designed ad hoc

To draw and divide the spaces, a continuous bookcase in wood painted in blue, interrupted by large splayed openings that allow communication and passages between the service areas and the main environment which includes dining area, living set up with sofas, chairs and a desk, in addition to the bedroom bedroom.

The service block is a containing volume with niches, configured as a wunderkammer that holds books, sculptures, objects and emotional memories.

The TV room is located in a central but protected position within the library; if necessary it can be transformed into a guest room.

The only room divided by real walls from the rest of the house, the bathroom is also a passage area that can be accessed both from the entrance / hallway and from the sleeping area.

Scanning of large windows with fitted niches

The semicircular shape of the building creates a rigorous and elegant repetition of large windows that extends along the entire geometric configuration of the apartment. Grafted into deep load-bearing walls, the full-height windows create welcoming and functional niches: as if they were other intimate and intimate rooms, they are set up with benches for the dining table, sofas for conversation, desks and storage boxes . Each window, while being the same as the others, thus responds to a specific function within a single environment.

The mimetic mutations of the Zarcola Architetti studio

Founded by Edoardo Giancola and Federico Zarattini, Zarcola is a young and dynamic architecture studio based in Milan and in the Lessini Mountains, in Veneto, which works wisely on relationship between historical pre-existing structures and contemporary interventions to restore ' mimetic mutations ' born from in-depth research on different construction methods.

The design peculiarities, urban and rural

During the years of study Federico and Edoardo crossed their training and professional experiences by sharing practice and design direction and then giving life to Zarcola Architetti. The peculiarity of the studio is that it broadens its research by working in two different contexts: the urban Milanese one and the rural one.