Casa Frascà Bosco: A Stone House Shaped by Calabria’s Coastal Terrain
Casa Frascà Bosco is a house in Roccella Ionica, Italy, designed by federico casati and completed in 2023. Set within the layered terrain of Calabria’s Gelsomini coast, the project turns local conditions into a clear architectural order, using hand-sculpted granite, deep shadow, and a stepped interior plan to organize daily life from the office and living room to the terrace and pool.
Located in Calabria, Casa Frascà Bosco stands in Roccella Ionica, a small town of 6,500 inhabitants on the Gelsomini coast. The site is shaped by the sea, the railway, and State Road 106 to the south, with hills and mountains rising to the north. That particular condition strongly informs the project.
Stone, strong shadow, and the idea of a closed surface set against a harsh landscape become the work’s founding elements. On the exterior, the facade is clad in granite. Once extracted and cut to size, the stone is carved by hand to create a rusticated effect.
A major part of the architectural effort lies in bringing order and symmetry to a highly heterogeneous structural grid that had already been built. The original slope of the lot also reappears in the composition of the interiors. On the ground floor, an office sits half a level above the living room and looks onto it.
The living room’s south-facing wall opens completely, connecting the interior directly to the covered outdoor area and the pool. On the upper floor, the three bedrooms open onto the terrace, conceived as a shared open-air room. The portico at ground level and the terrace above establish a facade that is perfectly symmetrical and proportioned despite the irregular structural grid.
That sense of order and openness gradually diminishes toward the north front, which is entirely blind except for the entrances to the house. In the basement, the layout places a laundry room, a playroom, and the technical rooms serving both the house and the pool.
Photography by Louis De Belle
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