Located in Treviso, Italy, Casa DB is a 2023 apartment renovation by studio RAUM. The design preserves the original 1930s structure’s high ceilings, stucco work, and doors while subtly adapting the layout for contemporary living. The renovation emphasizes color, with each room enveloped in carefully selected tones, and recreates historical flooring using modern materials. The result is a refined living space that balances past and present, honoring its roots while embracing modern needs.
Resident and Architect Matteo Condolo worked with his architecture studio RAUM, that counts Emanuele Baldin as partner, to realise this sophisticated interior renovation. Its traditional layout respects a historical structure characterised by high ceilings, original stucco, and decorative doors in keeping with the period.
Engaging with these pre-existing elements, the studio sought to improve and augment the historical features, without dismantling them entirely.
The old three-bedroom layout has been transformed into a large master bedroom – with a generous dressing area – alongside a lounge and office space at the other end of the house. The kitchen and facilities, positioned near the entrance hallway, occupy the same space they did originally.
Unmistakably minimalist, the newly introduced furnishings are a medley of contemporary and mid-century designs, such as vintage Panton chairs.
The ceiling in the narrow corridor has been lowered to conceal various appliances, and the traditionalness of the rooms is enhanced and contrasted with warmer hues through the strategic use of lighting.
The designers sought to delineate different areas through the unique colour of each room.
Alongside the lighting, saturated paint sets the mood and “trains the spatial reading of the apartment, unifying floors and ceilings in a single, immersive experience”.
The original Palladian flooring was unable to be salvaged, but Condolo diligently recreated the aesthetic through the use of contemporary materials like quartz and Carrara marble. Fresh oak planks in a timeless Italian herringbone design also reflect the original floors.
The decor is completed with clean lines and graphic elements in the modern furniture, where the furnishings express an open dialogue between past and present that extends the renovation to an artistic experiment and creation.
“The disruptive intention of this project is realised and accomplished through the use of colour and materiality; each room has its own soul,” explained studio RAUM.
“Characterised by a constant tension towards a modernity rooted in the preservation of the past. The project thus emerges as a fluid and rigorous entity that accompanies the breath of historical roots, tempering it with the rhythm of contemporary narrative.”
