On the eastern shore of Lago Maggiore in Switzerland, Wespi de Meuron Romeo shapes New House in San Nazzaro as a polygonal washed-concrete volume cut by two inner courtyards.
The plot dictates the form. Border setbacks pull the outer wall into an irregular polygon, and Wespi de Meuron Romeo inscribe a clean heated rectangle inside it, leaving the leftover triangles as open-air rooms on the valley and mountain sides. From the private street above, the house reads as a single closed storey, a low blind wall broken only by a steel gate. The stepped section toward the lake side is reserved for those already inside.
The skin is rough washed concrete, an aggregate-exposed surface that the studio expects to darken over time through weathering. Climbing plants are already finding the wall. Small square openings, set in loose constellations rather than rows, puncture the mass at irregular intervals. A coursed grey stone plinth meets the ground on the lake-facing flank, and a single corten chimney breaks the silhouette. The studio compares the result to an archaic rock; the immediate Ticino vernacular of rusticos and lakeside masonry sits in the same vocabulary.
Inside the perimeter, the rectangle holds an upper-level living-dining room with open kitchen. Two walls are sealed; the other two open in full sheets of glass onto the two courtyards. The mountain-side court screens the living space from the street while throwing direct sunlight into the room. The lake-side court works the opposite way, its closed walls catching sunlight and bouncing it inward. A staircase carved into a thick wall climbs to a small roof terrace that opens, finally, to the unbroken view of the lake.
The interior shifts register without breaking the material logic. Outside walls are coarse aggregate; inside, board-formed concrete is poured smooth, with the timber grain still legible in the surface. Floors are polished concrete. Cabinetry and pivot doors are solid oak. Skylights drop overhead into the kitchen and corridor, and the courtyards push the changing weather and time of day into the centre of the plan. Four bedrooms and bathrooms occupy the middle floor, lit again by courtyards that punch down into the section. The lowest level holds storage, services and a secondary garden exit.
The project belongs to a long Ticinese line of mass-wall houses tuned to topography, and it extends a body of work the studio has been refining across the canton. It accepts the constraints of the plot as the generator of form rather than working against them, and withholds the lake view entirely until the climb to the roof.
