Villas in Marziale Street

The customer’s aim for this project was to increase the value of a property, a villa from the 1950’s, made particularly interesting due to its location next to a wide green area that overlooks the gulf of Trieste. The most important aspect of this location is undoubtedly the sea view. In fact, this together with its location - on land suspended on top of a renaturalized quarry - set the theme of the project. It is no coincidence that the villa was once called the “Nest on the Rock”. The project took the location landscape and panoramic values and developed a plan for 6 villas (a total of 12 apartments). Considering the difficult topography (bi-directional gradients), the planning research was based on a variation of an architectural type. This allowed both the use of the entire building potential of the area (as required by the client) and on the other hand dwellings with space and fulfilling the characteristics of luxury dwellings. This luxury is not only achieved in the finishing touches, but is in the architectural features, the space proportions, the relationship between the single sections and various units of which the complex of villas is composed of. Both the program and the restrictions were then converted into the project; each villa had to have independent access, have big glazed panoramic façades and terraces opening on many sides, for a total exposure width of at least 10 meters. Each villa had to be endowed with a private garden and a terrace. The houses, foremost the exterior - gardens, terraces - and the glass walls had to maximise the benefit from the view but had also to guarantee the mutual privacy between the villas. A mixed/hybrid solution was developed where the terraced house was reviewed with the aim of avoiding excessive packaging of land. This would also have limited the view from the various exposures. The project’s solution was 6 villas (12 apartments) which stand alongside each other. The apartments are placed one above the other to fill the whole width of the villa creating a “carrè”: the ground floor (on street level) is divided into two entities, the rest of the levels belong to one apartment or the other. Each apartment has private green space and terrace or garden directly looking onto the historical city and the gulf of Trieste. This is completed with a shared swimming pool and garage placed on the other side of Via Marziale. The villas’ design is simple, linear and inspired by sobriety consistent with the general planning of the project. The glass parts prevail, coherently to the planned project. The internal spaces are based on rationality.