Villino Aspasia: Calm Contemporary House Near Palermo’s Coast
Villino Aspasia sits on the edge of Mondello in Palermo, Italy, where Architetto Gaspare Di Maggio reshapes a familiar villa into a calm urban escape. The two-level house trades street noise for layered materials, crafted joinery, and a clear dialogue between interior rooms and planted terraces. Across its rooms, a contemporary attitude meets traditional forms, giving the everyday rituals of living, cooking, and resting a precise and tactile setting.
Light filters through the pergola and lands on the decking, tracing the outline of the outdoor lounge as it drifts toward the small garden and kitchen yard. From the street, the traditional two-level volume with its pitched roof and round windows hides a more contemporary interior, where warm timber, resin, and marble pull the day inward and steer it toward quieter routines.
Inside this house on the margins of Mondello, Architetto Gaspare Di Maggio works within a familiar suburban shell to construct a refuge with clear character and strong material rhythm. The project reworks a multifamily villa into a contemporary home, grounding daily use in a rich interior palette that extends from garden to rooftop terrace. Rooms are drawn together through tailored cabinetry, articulated floors, and recurring textures that temper the move from city edge to domestic calm.
Arriving Through The Garden
Entry begins not at the front door but in the small internal garden that buffers the house from the main road. A pergola leans from the building and casts a shifting grid of shade over the decking, where low seating turns this threshold into an outdoor living room. Nearby, a compact solarium and a carefully composed external kitchen bring cooking, washing, and barbecuing into one continuous steel tableau, anchoring the yard as a place to gather. The same geometries and finishes that define this exterior—metal, masonry, and measured lines—prepare the eye for what unfolds inside.
Open Living With A Corten Core
At ground level, the interior opens as one large volume, yet it reads as distinct living and cooking worlds organized around a single corten-finished cabinet block. Just left of the entrance, custom joinery in wood, with vertical slats and milled boiserie, resolves the everyday clutter of arrival into one continuous element that hides a coat closet, console, mirror, shoe storage, and catchall. The central corten unit divides the room without fully closing views; toward the living side it gathers the television, storage, and a glazed corner fireplace, turning the hearth into a crisp metal-and-glass object. On the kitchen side, tall columns hold appliances and pantry storage, so that the island and dining table can stay sculptural and clear.
Kitchen Island And Material Rhythm
The kitchen forms a second focal point, defined by contrast between dark cabinetry and luminous stone. A central island wrapped in white marble carries cooking, washing, and a snack counter, its pale surface set against deep-toned fronts for emphasis. Nearby, a round white marble dining table with a truncated conical base, also custom made, anchors shared meals as a solid centerpiece. Along the back wall, anthracite-lacquered storage and an extra marble worktop run in a calm horizontal band, where a concealed door hides within the paneling and leads to a compact service zone with laundry and guest bathroom.
Bathrooms As Tactile Rooms
Wet rooms throughout the house push the material story further, turning small footprints into dense compositions of light and surface. In the ground-floor guest bathroom, a freestanding hourglass basin in solid surface by GESSI stands opposite the sanitary wall, paired with a column tap, dedicated mirror, and suspended lights that glow against textured tile. Quintessenza brick tiles in shifting blues, grays, and whites wrap the walls with alternating matte and glossy finishes, creating irregular reflections that keep the room lively. Upstairs, the principal bathroom layers large-format porcelain with a Calacatta marble effect from Atlas Concorde against deep Blu Notte resin, then adds a sauna beside the shower and a slim freestanding vanity with twin countertop bowls. The secondary bathroom continues the brickwork in gray and green around a sculpted solid-surface freestanding tub from Treesse, closing the sequence with a calm, immersive room.
Upper Level Rooms And Terraces
Ascending the folded metal stair, finished in corten and resting on a resin-clad concrete plinth, the upper floor gathers the quieter routines of work and rest. Here, flooring alternates again between gray resin perimeters and French herringbone oak parquet, using underfoot texture to describe circulation and more intimate zones. The main bedroom centers on a fixed masonry bed structure, whose integrated headboard merges with the wall to double as side tables, while an arched French door framed by plastered bookcases opens to the balcony. Behind an opaque glazed wall with sliding panels, a walk-in closet and the en suite bathroom sit as a private layer, their storage and fittings concealed until needed.
Workspace, Library, And Fitness Corner
A second upstairs room serves as a flexible study that can convert into a guest bedroom, furnished with bespoke cabinetry that maximizes every surface. A full-height bookcase with glass supports wraps the wall, meeting an L-shaped desk that frames a sofa bed and turns the corner into a productive yet relaxed nook. On the opposite side, a green-lacquered media unit anchors the television and storage, adding a vivid accent to the muted shell. Back downstairs, a wide glazed wall with sliding doors encloses a compact fitness corner off the main living area, so daily exercise stays visually linked to the heart of the home while remaining contained.
In both levels, the interplay between resin borders and oak parquet centers each room and gives circulation a drawn, almost graphic clarity. Matched with considered lighting and consistent use of corten, marble, and textured tiles, Villino Aspasia reads as a coherent interior world tuned to its owner’s need for retreat. The city sits just beyond the garden, yet inside the house every material choice leans toward calm, making daily routines feel measured rather than hurried.
Photography by Laura Crucitti
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