PL36 Duplex by Giulia Urciuoli
PL36 is a contemporary duplex apartment located in Verona, Italy, redesigned in 2021 by Giulia Urciuoli of Coarch Studio.
Description
Renovation project for a two-level apartment in Verona, near Castelvecchio.
The clients, a couple of young lawyers with three children, asked the architects to renovate the apartment with wooden floors and find space for contemporary furniture and some family objects they had collected.
The house had been renovated in various stages in the ’80s and early ’90s, the main work was to select and enhance the various interventions that followed one another, lightening the space and trying to make a story out of it.
Gio Ponti’s text “Manifesto della Casa adatta” of 1970 outlines some points that were the inspiration for the project:
We don’t have to adapt to a generic house but it is the house that has to adapt to us.
1. The adapted house is a way of thinking about housing in a versatile way to make it an expression of our cultural individuality.
2. Abandoning patterns of segregated rooms connected by anterooms, hallways, and doors,
3. No more walls in front of the eyes, no bigger or smaller spaces but to have great breadth and deeper internal views
The large living area has been kept as free as possible with long perspective views of the other rooms, the space is characterized by French herringbone parquet with long natural oak planks. The living area is delineated into two living areas by the stainless steel and wood staircase that leads to the sleeping area on the attic floor.
The first living area has a large custom-made sofa made of black lacquered wood and light blue velvet cushions and creates a convivial space with family objects and vintage lights, on the second living area, more cozy and familiar, dominates the existing fireplace covered with Calacatta Corchia marble. Also based on a design, the marble coffee tables were made with the same material as the slabs used for the fireplace.
An intervention that has enhanced the kitchen is a citation to Carlo Scarpa and the entrance Brion: it was opened in the closed volume of the kitchen that was relegated to a mere service space a circular opening that gave a framed view towards the dining table of Scarpa before separated from it. The white, monolithic peninsula kitchen, also in marble, is illuminated by an attic glass and brass chandelier by MENU TR BULB A SOSPENSIONE, a Nordic juxtaposition to the other design pieces in the house.
The Doge dining table by Carlo Scarpa for Cassina in brushed steel and glass is lit by a circular ZIRKOL – C PLUS suspension by Nemo lighting and lives together with the kitchen, becoming a convivial space.
Marble was also used in the bathrooms of the sleeping area since Verona has a district of marble and granite processing of excellence. Some spaces and service elements such as the bathrooms and the fireplace became the reason to use some marble cladding elements such as the Alba and the statuarietto, chosen by the architects together with the clients from the slab to the design up to the laying. The sleeping area in the attic space has a second living room that leads to the bedrooms and bathrooms where a marble statuarietto was used, on this floor it was chosen to lay the oak parquet to run.
The bedroom is illuminated by the IC lights of Michael Anastassiades and overlooks a small terrace with a view over the rooftops of Verona.
Photography courtesy of Giulia Urciuoli
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- by Matt Watts
