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By working with the materials present in the property,
the architects at once preserved its history and breathed
new life into it: “We found a lot of these...large pieces
of stone, 20 to 30cm large...and most of them were ancient
infrastructure of the building. And we just remove it and
we made a pattern of the floors in the garden and then inside
the house. And even, if you see, all the stairs of the
house are blocks of stone. Blocks of stone that were also
buried in the ground. You see, this stone also allows you
a lot of freedom because you can cut, adapt...and we just
removed the stones and put it again. Everything was done
in pieces. If you think about the dining room...we build
the new wall that exists there and fits exactly; you have
the feeling that the wall has always been there because you
use that old stone...it’s like a puzzle. All this movement
we make with the stones allows us to understand first this
feeling of time that is so important but the feeling...that
you don’t have to preserve in a direct sense; it’s also
good that you can, let’s say, remould or recreate the time
in a true way.”
The couple made weekly visits to the site to increase their
understanding of the property, and to intuit the next
steps of the renovation. This led to the discovery of an
entirely new level: “We decide to operate on the house with
freedom of discovery, the project step by step. We used to
go there at the weekends to look at the situation and try
to move another step on the project, and then every day you
have a kind of new surprise. One day we had this cistern,
that we now use as a playground for the kids, let’s say. And
it was a well to the facade and it was full of water, so
for me it was a well, but the archeologists, they say ‘Can
we take the water out of the well?’ So they take the water
out, and we visit with the stairs a wonderful cistern...
and we start to dig to make a connection to a cistern to
then use it as a space, and we start to dig and then we
decide to make a small tunnel just to see the situation...
the bricks that were around the small tunnel just fell and
there was already an arch there. And we said, ok we have
this arch, the arch of the cistern. And it was done, and
we just have to finish it. And it was so impressive this
idea that we are all trying to conduce the process and not
impose on it.”
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