The project was born out of our desire to renovate and restore an important construction of the minor Venetian house bulding prior to Nineteenth Century, while maintaining its characteristic architectural stylistic elements and adapting them to suit an accommodation business.
The constitutive architectural elements of this typology of architecture have been stripped from the cladding that hid them, with an aim to bring them out.
The restoration served the purpose of highlighting the carrying structure of the roof, made of larch beams of Cadore, as well as the original fired brick walls dating back to the period of construction.
We preserved the Venetian terrazzo floor made of paste of lime and parts in cogolo white stone, now impossible to find; we then went on to maintaining and restoring the staircase in soft stone of Vicenza, whose quarries are almost worn-out, just like the Venetian terrace with parts in red marble of Verona, which can be found at the entrance of the building.
However, we did not succeed in redeveloping everything so to restore the original use, because the current standard of qualitative comfort and the required technological systems did not permit us to do so.
I refer, for instance, to the internal dividers in vertical and horizontal boards, called “scorzoni e catinelle”, of which we decided to keep evidence by using them as a structural peculiarity that we put in the newly made Venetian terrace bathrooms’ floors.
This was our philosophy in approaching the restoration, that has been carried out by using the traditional constructional techniques which have been handed down by our fathers.
Arch. Roberto Tommasini