THE NORTHERN ITALIAN city of Turin has always embraced both high and low culture. For nearly 400 years, it was the seat of the Savoys, the royal family who ruled Italy from 1861 until 1946, when they were deposed by referendum. Their Baroque primary residence, Palazzo Reale, with its Versailles-inspired mirrored halls, still stands as a reminder of the city’s grandeur. In the 1960s, Turin was a center of the Arte Povera movement, which championed art made with commonplace materials, such as Mario Merz’s plastic-bag-and-soil igloos. It was also where the architect Ada Bursi, born in 1906 in Verona, became one of the first women in Italy to practice architecture, designing schools and public housing across the city. “[For her] beauty was not in the value of the materials — it was in how you worked with them,” says Andrea Marcante, 58, who runs the Turinese architecture studio Marcante-Testa with his longtime friend Adelaide Testa, 58. “Bursi believed in democratic luxury.”
Marcante and Testa are sitting in the dining area of the apartment they recently renovated for Marco Lobina, 58, the founder of Rezina, a Turin-based company that makes resin architectural finishings. The home is in a five-story building that’s among Bursi’s residential projects in Turin and sits on a quiet corner of Corso Giovanni Lanza in the Borgo Crimea neighborhood, a wealthy enclave on the Po River’s right bank. Completed in 1958, it features a plain white Modernist facade (a contrast to the area’s more common Art Nouveau-style edifices) pierced by rows of narrow windows and bookended by wide balconies. The structure had been conceived as low-cost housing, but Bursi still managed to include several playful details, such as curved panels of fluted wood in the entranceway, amoeba-shaped poured-glass door handles and confetti-like mosaic tiles that decorate the supporting columns and the balconies’ undersides.
Like Bursi, both Marcante and Testa began their careers in Turin. In 2014, after working together for a decade at a different firm, the duo founded their own studio and started designing homes, restaurants and shops that incorporated their now-signature color-blocking, patterned surfaces and geometric molding. Inside a 2019 apartment project in Milan, for instance, the architects employed glass screens framed in bubble gum pink or brass to delineate hallways and create sitting nooks.
IN THE CORSO Lanza building, a ribbon of the same small cherry red tiles as those found on the facade zigzag up the communal stairwell to the Lobina apartment, which Marcante and Testa finished renovating this year. When the home belonged to its previous owner, the architect Maria Grazia Conti Daprà, the floors were heavy, dark-stained wood. But Lobina and his wife, Isabella Errani, 60, the owner of a public relations firm, instead wanted color and light. After the couple asked their architects to experiment with different hues and resin techniques, Marcante-Testa embedded thin channels of glass tile — a reference to Bursi’s aesthetic — directly into cream-toned resin floors at uneven intervals, creating an appearance of rippling water. For the primary suite, toward the back of the 2,368-square-foot duplex, the technique is mirrored in butter yellow against a steely blue bathroom wall. In a separate wing to the left of the entrance are two compact rooms — for the couple’s daughter, Virginia, 28, who lives in Milan, and a live-in housekeeper — both decorated in sea foam green and lilac.
The central sitting area that connects these private rooms was previously sunken lower than the neighboring dining space, but Lobina, who worried it would be a hazard for older relatives, had it leveled. The newly lowered floor left a gap beneath the living room’s original built-in wooden cabinets, which the designers bridged with metallic laminate panels. Then a small gray stone step was installed at the base of the wooden staircase, which leads up to a TV room and den in the mansard loft that once housed a studio. On the main floor, Marcante-Testa also turned a former office into a kitchen with a luminous eat-in space, which opens onto a plant-filled balcony. (The home’s previous galley kitchen was expanded to become Virginia’s bedroom.) Yet the dove gray cupboards and cream tiled walls are updated versions of the original design. “We tried to preserve the spirit of the period,” Testa says.
For Lobina, whose former Turin home had high ceilings and drafty rooms, warmth and comfort were the primary concerns. He asked that the designers line the bedroom floors with petrol blue carpet. The street sounds from below are further muffled by the dark teal wool blend that covers the built-in armoire and mottled gray knit that upholsters the floor-to-ceiling headboard. Marcante and Testa then created a walk-in closet in the connecting bathroom in dark stained teak — a reference to the home’s original carpentry, now with fuchsia painted around the edges — and a matching wooden desk tucked into a window alcove between the bathroom and bedroom, overlooking the Renaissance-style basilica that crowns Monte dei Cappuccini in the distance.
But while the apartment was a collaboration, it’s ultimately a testament to Bursi, who lived in a similar top-floor apartment on Corso Lanza. Although she was a contemporary of the architects Gio Ponti and Carlo Mollino, she never became as well known as they did; she was the only woman in her 1938 graduating class at Politecnico di Torino, and the first to be accredited in Turin. According to Caterina Franchini, 55, a former researcher at the Politecnico di Torino, Bursi, who died in 1996, never started her own firm or ascended through the ranks of academia — pathways that were mostly closed to women at the time. Instead, she found employment with the city, where she spent decades in relative anonymity, rebuilding Turin after World War II. Yet her works continue to inspire new generations of architects. This apartment, Marcante says, “was a way for us to speak about her.”
Photo assistant: Pietro Di Pace
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