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Casa Soleto, a 17th-century house in Puglia, Italy, has been carefully renovated using lime plaster, terrazzo and furniture salvaged from a monastery.

The four-bedroom house, parts of which are over 400 years old, was given a refresh by its owners – architecture firm Studio Andrew Trotter and its studio manager Marcelo Martínez.

Exterior of Casa Soleto — Casa Soleto is located in southern Italy

While no structural changes were made, the designers redid some of the building’s roofs, which were falling apart, added two bathrooms and powder rooms, and swapped the living and dining spaces around.

“The street front had all the baroque details of a small palazzo and inside it was like time stood still,” Studio Andrew Trotter founder Andrew Trotter said of the house.

Dining room in Casa Soleto — Parts of the house are over 400 years old

None of its walls were straight and the layout was designed for the needs of past occupants, with a chapel located behind the kitchen so that the family did not need to leave the house to pray.

This place of worship was transformed into a media room and a powder room with an outdoor shower, creating a space that can be used as an extra guestroom if needed.

Old chapel in Puglia house — A former chapel was turned into a media room that can also serve as an extra guest room

Trotter and Martínez aimed for the renovation of Casa Soleto to resemble the original building as much as possible and the team preserved much of its original flooring.

“We tried to use natural materials as much as possible,” Martínez told Dezeen.

“We used lime plasters to give a natural and raw feeling to the walls, terrazzo floors – battuto alla veneziana – in the areas where new floors had to be made, wooden windows and doors seeking to imitate the original ones, cast iron hardware and linen sofas.”

Bedroom in Italian home by Studio Andrew Trotter and Marcelo Martínez — The 17th-century house was decorated with modern and antique furniture

The designers also chose a discrete colour palette for the lime plaster used on the walls of the house, which on the ground floor culminate in five-metre-high ceilings.

“We chose subtle earthy and greeny colours,” Martínez said. “Colours played a central role, as some make spaces feel light, others moody.”

Studio Andrew Trotter kept the house’s original kitchen and commissioned local woodworkers from the city of Lecce to recreate the home’s original wooden doors.

To add to the natural feel of the interior, the team used jute rugs to cover the stone floors and sourced linen upholstery and curtains from local artisans.

Living room in Casa Soleto — Lime plaster was used to give the walls a natural feel

Furniture and accessories by Danish brand Frama were juxtaposed with antique furniture pieces including an 18th-century dining table that was salvaged from an Abruzzo monastery.

The studio also sourced a late 18th- early 19th-century wardrobe from Lombardy for one of the bedrooms in Casa Soleto, which can only be accessed by going through the front patio and up an outside staircase.

Kitchen in Casa Soleto — The original kitchen was kept and refurbished

Studio Andrew Trotter, which has worked on a number of projects in Puglia, plans to use Casa Soleto as a rental property.

“We purchased and restored it mainly to rent it out, and also to invite creative minds that we appreciate, make gatherings and exhibitions,” Martínez said.

Previous projects the studio has completed in the area include a 19th-century school that was turned into a family home and an earth-toned villa made from local sandstone.

The photography is by Salva López.

Project credits:

Interior design: Andrew Trotter and Marcelo Martínez
Plaster application: Tullio Cardinale and team
Woodwork: Alba Falegnameria

Reference

designing and drawing ‘one house per day’

Following a year-long exploration of domestic space, architect Andrew Bruno celebrates the completion of his newly published book, ‘One House Per Day.’ Each day for the year of 2020 while living in Brooklyn, Bruno imagined and sketched a new dwelling each day with a compound drawing comprising an isometric, planar, and sectional view. He has now moved to Atlanta on a teaching fellowship while these 365 drawings have been collected together in a comprehensive publication in the order they were drawn, as high-quality 1:1 reproductions. Readers are invited to explore the designer’s year-long investigation, and discover imaginary spaces that range from the familiar to the radical.

The exercise began on social media as a rejection of the single nuclear family program with which the detached house has become synonymous. ‘Even the most architecturally radical houses are typically designed to serve the ends of the single-family patron,’ writes Andrew Bruno in an essay. ‘One House Per Day responds to this arbitrary constraint by imagining over and over how the architectural form of the house might be detached from its association with the monocultural single family.’

photos by designboom, drawings by Andrew Bruno | @one_house_per_day

andrew bruno reimagines domestic space

Andrew Bruno’s One House Per Day proposes a captivating collection of domestic spaces imagined with new and inventive expressions. The concept of the single nuclear family home has long been a general archetype in the realm of residential architecture. It has become increasingly essential to question the relevance of this singular design approach to accommodate the complex and evolving nature of human relationships and societal structures. While this typology has long represented privacy, autonomy, and personal success, it simultaneously poses significant limitations in fostering communal living, adaptability, and sustainability.

Nonetheless, Bruno acknowledges the enduring American desire for suburban living. ‘The desire for a detached house in a suburban landscape is ingrained in American culture,’ Bruno explains, ‘and architects risk consigning themselves to irrelevance if they ignore it.’

‘a collection of rooms divided by arcades with arched openings of varying heights…’

exploration through ritualization

The cover of Andrew Bruno’s One House Per Day showcases 365 indented circles to symbolize the 365 houses, providing the book with a distinctive tactile quality. Printed on on grey recycled paper, each drawing is allocated a full page followed by an index containing a brief and description.

The publication contains a forward by Keith Krumwiede, contributions by Malcolm Rio, Alessandro Orsini and Nick Roseboro, along with a section listing ‘One Sentence Per Day,’ by architect and author Clark Thenhaus — who explores Bruno’s ‘ritualized’ process of creation by embarking on a journal of daily reflections. The book concludes with a short essay in which Bruno examines the role of the detached house in American culture from social, political, and economic viewpoints.

‘a cylindrical volume sliced to create four rooms with sloped ceilings, punctuated by tree-filled voids’

‘two long and narrow gabled volumes separated by a wide tree-filled yard…’

‘composed of a series of voids carved from a vaulted solid’
‘a collection of separate circular rooms of different sizes and opacities under one large canted circular roof’