Casa BM is a residential transformation on the outskirts of Paesana, Northern Italy, where a disused 1960s house is reworked and extended to confront the spatial ambiguities of the suburban Po Valley landscape. Through reorientation, selective addition, and material restraint, the project reorganizes domestic life around landscape, light, and sequence rather than road frontage or formal display.
Casa BM Technical Information
- Architects: ErranteArchitetture
- Location: Paesana, Cuneo, Italy
- Gross Area: 450 m2 | 4,844 Sq. Ft.
- Project Years: 2016 – 2025
- Photographs: © Luca Bosco
The building seeks a condition of elsewhere, where openness and closure, proximity and distance, are continuously negotiated to establish a balanced relationship between domestic space and the scale of the landscape.
– Sarah Becchio and Paolo Borghino
Reclaiming the Suburban Edge: Site, Context, and Orientation
Casa BM occupies a slightly sloping plot at the entrance to the Po Valley, a territory marked by infrastructural roads, generic apartment blocks, and scattered detached houses. The site sits close to the Po River and opens westward toward pastureland and the Alpine horizon dominated by Mount Monviso. This bifurcated context, compressed on one side and expansive on the other, establishes the central tension that structures the project.
The original house privileged its relationship with the road, aligning primary living spaces toward traffic and relegating the garden-facing western side to bedrooms. ErranteArchitetture overturns this hierarchy by reorienting the house toward solar exposure, landscape, and privacy. The main façade now addresses the south and west, redirecting daily life toward the open terrain while shielding the building from the visual pressure of nearby structures.
Rather than asserting contrast within an undistinguished suburban fabric, the intervention operates through measured correction. The project seeks spatial legibility and environmental coherence, treating orientation, enclosure, and access as tools to reestablish identity within a fragmented periphery.
Transformation Through Addition: Volume, Plan, and Spatial Reconfiguration
The intervention combines the recovery of the existing two-story house with the addition of a one-story pavilion on the eastern side, generating an L-shaped plan that reorganizes circulation and use. The new pavilion accommodates the main entrance and living area, alongside a study with independent access, allowing domestic and work-related activities to coexist without overlap.
While much of the original external shell is retained, the interior is radically reworked. Roofs and slabs are replaced, enabling a redistribution of functions across levels and a recalibration of proportions. Kitchen and dining spaces occupy the restructured ground floor, while private rooms and workspaces extend upward and laterally, creating continuity between the old structure and the new addition.
Despite the apparent orthogonality of the volumes, spatial experience is shaped by oblique alignments, curved paths, and subtle level changes. These devices extend beyond the interior, connecting rooms to terraces, embankments, and a semi-basement workshop, producing a continuous sequence between built form and terrain.
Mediation Between Openness and Closure: Envelope and Façade Strategies
The building envelope responds selectively to its surroundings. Northern and western elevations, most visible from the road, maintain a restrained presence through a monochrome plaster finish that recalls the preexisting structure. These elevations act as a quiet backdrop, absorbing the inconsistencies of the surrounding fabric.
In contrast, the southern façade opens through a full-height glazed wall framed by a composite timber structure. This surface establishes a direct visual relationship with the garden and distant landscape, admitting controlled daylight while extending interior space outward through a porch and terrace. The transparency is not absolute but moderated through structural depth and overhangs.
To the east, opacity becomes a deliberate strategy. Reinforced-concrete walls, loggias, and a covered passage buffer the proximity of a neighboring apartment block. These thickened edges regulate privacy and create intermediate spaces that mediate between interior rooms and their constrained context.
Construction as Research: Materials, Details, and Self-Building Practices
Material choices throughout Casa BM prioritize clarity and directness. Exposed concrete, pine plywood panels, concrete blocks, and standard construction components define both domestic and work spaces. The palette avoids formal hierarchy, allowing structural and spatial logic to remain legible.
Numerous custom details reinterpret ordinary building elements. Gutters, downpipes, railings, roof bracing, staircases, and even the existing ridge beam are treated as sites of experimentation, where technical necessity becomes an opportunity for architectural articulation. These details foreground assembly and use rather than finish.
The construction process itself becomes part of the project’s architectural intent. The involvement of local contractors, the reuse of salvaged materials, and periods of self-construction align design decisions with feasibility and direct engagement. Through this approach, the building emerges from a continuous negotiation between concept, making, and context.
About ErranteArchitetture
ErranteArchitetture is an architectural practice based in Savigliano, Cuneo, Italy, founded by Sarah Becchio and Paolo Borghino. The studio works across multiple scales of architecture, with a strong focus on the narrative and poetic dimensions of design, exploring simple construction methods, ordinary materials, and experimental attitudes toward building processes, often integrating research, teaching, and self-construction practices into its projects.
Credits and Additional Notes
- Structural engineers: Fabio Borello (structural design and construction site safety)
- Client: Private
- Construction company: Local companies with self-construction
- Other contributors: Window and door frames by BrunettoLegno; supply of construction timber by Clen Legnami;
- Photographer: Luca Bosco
- Communication partner and press office: The Architecture Curator
