Guardia di Finanza by Brandlhuber+ in Scopello, Sicily transforms an abandoned 1970s customs police station into a guesthouse where concrete and Mediterranean light reach a new understanding.
On a hillside above the Gulf of Castellammare, near the entrance to Sicily's Zingaro nature reserve, a building designed by Michele di Simone in 1976 had stood empty for years. The former Guardia di Finanza station—once home to Italy's customs police—presented the Berlin-based practice Brandlhuber+ with a structure of uncommon character: curved concrete balconies cantilevering toward the sea, a muscular frame softened by decades of salt air.
Arno Brandlhuber's intervention, developed with Giacomo Messina, Martha Michalski, and Marco Wagner, proceeded by subtraction rather than addition. Wall plaster came away to reveal the building's skeleton: a concrete frame infilled with local tufa stone. Interior partitions disappeared, opening the floor plate to Mediterranean cross-ventilation and views that now sweep uninterrupted from mountain to water.
The approach resembles archaeology more than renovation. Each layer removed exposed another stratum of the building's material history. The concrete, freed from its coating of institutional paint, shows the grain of its formwork. The tufa, suddenly visible, grounds the structure in its Sicilian geology. What emerges is a building both more raw and more refined than what the customs officers left behind.
New elements arrive with deliberate clarity. Northern windows, once domestic in scale, became room-height sliding doors opening onto the distinctive balconies. Interior partitions, where privacy requires them, fold accordion-style from wooden planks—present when needed, absent when not. A new staircase climbs to a rooftop terrace that had always existed but never been accessed.
The furniture selection completes the transformation. LC5 sofas by Le Corbusier occupy spaces originally designed for filing cabinets and desks. Carrara marble sliding doors replace institutional hardware. The combination is neither nostalgic nor ironic but straightforwardly honest: good design serving daily life, the building's authoritarian past repurposed for pleasure. The Guardia di Finanza has finally stood down.
