co.arch’s refurbishment of a duplex inside Mario Galvagni’s 1972 Giomein complex doesn’t treat the Alpine context as décor but as a structural force.
The original apartment—sheathed in jacquard fabric, plush carpeting, mirrors and timber—was a time capsule whose coherence risked collapsing under any additive gesture. Instead, the architects began by stripping it back, uncovering the broken roof planes, shifting pitches and eccentric geometries that reveal how Galvagni once translated the mountain’s topography into domestic space. This re-exposure of the structure became the project’s true foundation.
Once the compromised surfaces were removed, the interior’s essential elements surfaced with a renewed sharpness: the copper-clad roof lined in larch, the bow windows acting as calibrated optical devices, and the interlocking volumes that modulate light like Alpine weather fronts. co.arch’s approach treats these existing conditions not as relics but as active instruments—Galvagni’s analogon at work, turning the Matterhorn into a spatial collaborator. The redesign acknowledges this legacy while refusing nostalgic mimicry, grafting a quiet contemporary language onto the architecture’s underlying tension.
Materially, the project moves with a measured softness. Besana carpeting reinstates a sense of warmth without reviving the overload of the original, its tone shifting subtly from public to private rooms. Where function demands clarity—kitchen and bathrooms—beige limestone introduces a cooler register that still speaks to the surrounding palette. The use of Calce del Brenta across the walls draws a thread between past and present; its refined texture holds light in ways that recall the old boiserie without recreating it. Scarpa’s Casa Tabarelli hovers in the background as an intellectual companion rather than a template, informing devices like contrangoli that sharpen the reading of thresholds.
The living area crystallises co.arch’s strategy of calibrated reinterpretation. The conversation pit—a quintessential 1970s motif—is neither fetishised nor erased; instead, it becomes a lowered terrain of bespoke seating, loosely echoing Bellini’s Camaleonda without quoting it. A perimeter in oak gathers the space inward, its geometry oriented toward a Verde Alpi marble fireplace that anchors the room with a sculptural calm. One step up, the dining area introduces a pale blue refectory-style table and bench, drawing the eye toward the windows where high-altitude light becomes the true protagonist.
Across the apartment, micro-architectures animate domestic life: a rotated-square aperture framing the kitchen in a subtle nod to Galvagni’s luminous geometries; a Verde Alpi threshold leading toward earth-green cabinetry and stainless steel; a corridor that choreographs the transition to the sleeping quarters. The children’s bunk bed reads almost as an Alpine bivouac folded indoors, while the master room in the attic—set on a timber platform evoking a ship’s cabin—turns rest into an act of orientation toward the Matterhorn. Wooden shutters refine this dialogue, modulating both privacy and the mountain’s constant presence.
What emerges is an interior that operates through quiet precision. co.arch remove what has decayed, protect what remains vital, and stitch a contemporary domesticity into the bones of Galvagni’s experimental architecture. Rather than smoothing out the building’s idiosyncrasies, they let its inherent tensions breathe—allowing the mountain to speak through the lines, volumes and calibrated cuts of light.
