Casa e rustici Minusio

The existing villa, built around 1960, lies on a hillside edge above Locarno with a wonderful view over Lake Maggiore. The villa is characterized by a locally anchored façade materiality and by its sloping roof form. The intervention is reduced to clarifying the spatial continuum within the interior – on the ground floor, the previously hidden kitchen is shifted southward toward the center. The kitchen is positioned in the east wing, reinforcing the spatial connection from entrance and living room to the outdoor seating area and the surrounding landscape. Around this “room with a view” emerges contemporary living, while in the west wing a sleeping area is maintained. With the demolition of the existing fireplace installation and the original kitchen partition wall, a generous, double-height space is created in the dining area. The original staircase to the upper floor is preserved and newly interwoven into the space.

A new distribution of uses and two new staircases reorganize the “double rustico” into a new spatial continuum of different degrees of publicness: in the nearly square western rustico, two bedrooms are stacked one above the other, while the elongated body in the east accommodates the living area on the ground floor and the kitchen with dining room above. With the newly inserted wooden ceiling, the interior space of the new kitchen is linked to the pergola in the exterior. The lofty, sacral-like room is deliberately furnished with a deep kitchen unit. The minimal articulation of the adjoining building elements lends this space an archaic calm. A suspended steel staircase connects the dining room with the living room below. This space, dug into the hillside, is primarily heated by the new fireplace. The compact living room also functions as a distributor to the bedrooms, and the bathroom is located between the two volumes, integrated with the hillside stair access.

The materialization is deliberately reduced, with careful attention to ensuring that in the rooms used during the day, raw, untreated, or natural surfaces are applied. With the increasing presence of artificial light, color or worked surfaces are used more frequently.

Client: Private

Planning: Rossetti+Wyss Architekten

Photos: © Jürg Zimmermann