Living with Nature and in It

In the heart of Franciacorta, among the vineyards of the family estate, Valentina Moretti has designed her home as a radical gesture of conciliation with nature. This is not only about architecture, but a way of living and thinking. It is a house that does not try to dominate the landscape, but to become landscape itself, open to the light, sounds, and seasons. It is home as a living organism, in which every element has been conceived to last, age and transform as happens in nature. This work makes a strong point of low definition, considered not as a lack but as an essential space of “emptiness” left to the imagination and transformation. In effect this is not the usual highly polished architecture, but the translation of an idea of home into four volumes of brutalist flavour, where structure and decorative apparatus coincide, lying between woods to the north and a garden to the south, and connected to each other by a series of “interspaces”. Here the relation between architecture, furnishings and nature is fluid, continuously moving, alive: a micro-ecosystem similar to that discussed by Luca Molinari in his book Stanze. Abitare il desiderio.

Quoting Gio Ponti, Molinari writes of rooms as being “worlds”, a “portrait of those who inhabit and continually modify them over the arc of the seasons and their own lives, and also because they tell the story of what we have taken from the world and how we have modified it”. Molinari invites us to interrogate each room, to enter into contact with the subtlest nuances of our existence, that leave us with a feeling of completeness and let us observe the world with different eyes. For Molinari the privilege of discovering details that fill us with emotion, to marvel at them, is an exercise in wonder to be cultivated. Every room is made not only of walls and objects, but defined by the more subtle materials of changing light and reacting colours, surface noises and the tactile sensation of every material. Smells, connected with lived in spaces, with animals, with people, contribute to creating the unique atmosphere of each space.