Effebi House, Arezzo province Interior, Tuscany Apartment Redevelopment, Italian Architecture Images

Effebi House in Arezzo province, Tuscany

Apartment Refurbishment Interior Project in Italy – design by Architettura Matassoni

29 Apr 2019

Effebi House in Arezzo

Design: Architettura Matassoni

Location: Arezzo province, Tuscany, Italy

Effebi House is the result of the refurbishment of a seventies flat located near Arezzo in Tuscany, Italy, made for a four people young family.

Modern architecture is above all a freedom conquer!
Freedom from mechanical life-style inherited by our cultural evolution, from the systematic and analytical reasining that industrilized our lifes, and freedom from the alienation and fragmentetion of time and space.

So, how to be faithful to these high principles working inside a simple architectural box?
In other words, as architects, how to be respectful to our duty to create poetry despite the heaviness of the prosaic daily-life constraints? Physical limits, money, client’s will.

Architettura Matassoni think the answer could be a space that could comunicate on a deep level of perception; following the Edward Wilson’s ideas about human evolution, it should be an environment capable to call to memory the feeling of a psychologically comfortable natural space, like something primitive we already have inside our self, like an heritage older than every cultural superstructure we built.

Architettura Matassoni focused on those fundamental human needs concerning the “ ancestral shelter”; this means an essential architecture and a space, devoiding of sophistications. An artificial fluid micro-landscape suitable for living innately.

The client’s brief program included a whole living area composed by the entrance, the livingroom, the diningroom, the kitchen with a small storage. Going on, through a wardrobe-distribution space, we find the night-area comprehensive of three bedrooms and twoo bathrooms. Because of the common property of the perimeter walls, they couldn’t be modified and we have had to image this space as inside an untouchable box.

Despite the delicate existing structural masonry (protected by very strict rules to ensure the building against the earthquakes), we designed one whole and organic environment for the living-area, obtainable realising a wide opening in the main internal wall.

To make the most of the surface, using the smallest amount of money possible, we also decided to use plasterboard panels for the mostly: this is a cheap material but very adapt to make the complex shapes we wanted. Indeed the purpose of the project was to create a very fluid space by using enveloping surfaces.

The resulting space had to be very dynamic and, as much as possible abstract, to avoid the feeling to be inside a simple house inside a traditional box made by orthogonal surfaces. We wanted to create a surreal space. To achieve the goal we let rise the wood floorings on to the walls and the ceilings go down, creating the narrow cuts in which are settled the strips led for the lighting.

Using these sculpted shapes, we wanted to call to memory the feeling of a natural space, focusing on those fundamental human needs concerning the “ ancestral shelter”.

Effebi House in Tuscany – Building Information

Architectural project: Architettura Matassoni (Architects Alessandro and Leonardo Matassoni)
Structure: Engineer Alessandro Romei

Surface: 106 square meters of net area
Location: Arezzo province, Tuscany, Italy
Date of completion: february 2019
Estimated cost/square meter: about 900,00 €/mq.