Casa Fràra: Punto Zero Reworks a Historic Apartment in Ferrara, Italy
Casa Fràra is an apartment renovation in Ferrara, Italy, designed by Punto Zero around a dramatic new stair and a vivid dialogue with the building’s historic shell. Completed in 2025, the project sets brass, walnut, stone, and marble against exposed timber ceilings and frescoed surfaces, shaping rooms that feel warm, layered, and slightly theatrical without losing sight of the apartment’s Ferrarese character.
About Casa Fràra
“We wanted to write a narrative made of dissonant, unfamiliar accents in relation to the building’s historic context, with its exposed timber ceilings and frescoes, opening a dialogue that would further heighten their value,” the architects explain.
The project develops around a double-flight stair clad in brass, conceived as a strongly scenographic element. Its metallic surface extends through every room it passes through: the riser and tread are in brass, and one step becomes a suspended shelf that wraps the partition.
As Arianna Nobile, partner at Punto Zero, describes it, the stair reads like a kind of golden tunnel escaping the stairwell enclosure. At times it becomes an entry niche, at others a suspended object, appearing in the living area before ending in the sleeping quarters.
The intervention’s core emerges most clearly in the choice of materials. European walnut parquet, laid in a French herringbone pattern in the living area and in straight runs in the attic-level sleeping zone, enters into a tactile exchange with Pietra Serena Extra Dura stone, which marks the passage from one room to the next by covering both horizontal planes—the floor threshold and the upper lintel—and the two vertical jambs, creating a kind of portal.
A similar intensity carries into the bathrooms. In the primary bath, large-format Calacatta Oro slabs form the base for the recessed shower trays and the freestanding tub; in the guest bath, Arabescato Carrara marble meets the cool gray tones of Kerakoll resin.
Set against the large frescoed backdrop uncovered during construction in the living room, a monolithic block of Verde Guatemala marble serves as a custom-designed cabinet. The domestic interiors evoke the warm, precious atmosphere requested by the owners: a home that is anti-minimal and almost theatrical, one that makes an immediate impression and surprises through contemporary insertions within the original elements of a typical Ferrarese property.
Photography by ELLER Studio and Serena Eller Vainicher
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