Casa Poggio ai Frati

​

The name of the place, Poggio ai Frati, (“Brothers’ Hill”) led us to imagine a place of contemplation, meditation and spirituality, ancestral practices and attitudes which have become, today, indispensable in everyday life.
In essence, the home, the primary place of security and expression of the most basic aspects of life (sleeping, eating, loving), is always a reflection of the times in which its inhabitants live.

From this, a concept was born for this project based on the need for reduction, understood as a process of purification and simplification, spiritual and intellectual, a concept that will serve as a guiding vector for the development of the house.

Its location, at the top of a small hill and surrounded by olive trees, opens onto a 360-degree landscape: in this setting, the shape, almost primordial, recalls a child's drawing, around the central fireplace, the fulcrum and hearth of the house.
Its plan representation favors the landscape, clearly separating the urbanized area of the Arno plain, to the east, from the rural and wooded areas of the surrounding hills, to the west.

The house is spread over a single floor, fully connected to the exterior thanks to the large windows and pergolas which extend its volumes towards the surrounding landscape.
The entire outdoor environment is designed as a vegetable garden, with a greenhouse and other small support infrastructure.

Designed in an ash gray color, with light wood window frames without exterior shutters, the house, with glass facing the landscape, takes on an appearance that is both almost monastic and elegantly refined in its simplicity.
All around it, naturally intertwined, the tall pine trees, olive trees and vegetable plants bring to the whole a plant fluidity which, by its simplicity, respects the fundamental conception of the project.

“Knowing how to simplify means eliminating the superfluous so that only what is necessary can speak.”
(Hans Hofmann).