In Varese, an early twentieth-century building, with the “bottega” and colonnade at street level and the workshop and living quarters on the upper floors, is today the subject of a careful modification and redistribution of the interiors, designed to create new residential spaces carefully detailed.
The project is aimed at enhancing the original character and formal elements of the building, such as the stone staircase and its decorative iron parapet, the original fixtures and the ceilings that, in some points, reveal the wooden beams, placing them in relation with a redesign of spaces of a contemporary and minimal style, with simple lines and cuts of clean perspectives.
Furnishings with plastic and geometric shapes come into play, which, together with iconic design elements and hand-made ceramics, are in tune with the new interiors.
Light, an essential element in architecture, is very often a difficult theme to coordinate within buildings in historic centres; here a skylight lets the zenithal light flood part of the house; in the service rooms, glazed cuts create suggestive plays of light like lanterns.

Name: AM house
Location: Varese, Italy
Year: 2022
Typology: Private residences – Photographer: Andrea Ceriani @andrea.ceriani www.andreaceriani.com, Architect: Francesca Barbieri

Andrea Ceriani is a professional landscape and architecture photographer, with a background as an architect that lives on in his gaze through attention to the composition of the image, the use of light and the sense of measure, understood as the fundamental relationship between the observer and the represented space.
Starting from drawing, during his academic career he identified photography as the most expressive language for him.
The places portrayed in the various scales, whether interior spaces, buildings or landscapes, become in his works the land of a slow and physical exploration, necessary to reach an image that suggests to the observer a dilated dimension of time. Photography thus becomes a precious tool of investigation, capable of capturing fragments of reality that silently reveal the intimate relationship between the photographer and the represented space.
He works individually on personal research projects and on assignment in collaboration with national and international architecture firms, designers and editorial offices, with publications in paper and web magazines.

Francesca Barbieri: “An architect, graduated in Construction Architecture at Politecnico di Milano, with a master thesis on a new campus for Columbia University, New York.
After her studies and her prossional qualification, obtained at Politecnico di Milano, she worked in Madrid at a design studio, specialising mainly in the in the residential sector, with particular care and design of furnishings and interiors.
Subsequently, few collaborations with structured realities, first in Savona then in Varese, allowed her to work on different scales, dealing with various architectural projects in the building sector.
These experiences have led to a professional affirmation that has resulted in the realisation of her own design identity, with the guidance and teaching dictated by the academic and professional path.She currently holds an assignment for Teaching Support activities in the field of architectural and urban composition at Politecnico di Milano.”