Esplendido Townhouse is an approved but unbuilt adaptive reuse proposal for a historic residence in Lequile, Puglia. The scheme reorganizes a sequence of vaulted rooms around contemporary domestic life while retaining the masonry, patterned floors, courtyard, and roofscape that define the building’s relationship to its town.
Esplendido Townhouse Technical Information
- ArchitectsEsplendido Design
- LocationVia A. Manzoni 33-39, Lequile, Italy
- Gross Area160 m2 | 1,722 Sq. Ft.
- Project Years2026
- Photographs© Esplendido Design
“Old and new coexist rather than compete.”
– Esplendido Design
Reading the Existing Townhouse
The proposal begins with a townhouse whose value lies less in a singular formal gesture than in the accumulated specificity of its fabric. Set within the dense, low-rise streets of Lequile, the building occupies an irregular footprint behind a facade articulated by a local stone plinth, weathered limewash, timber doors, and carved surrounds. A raised roof volume, visibly darker and more heavily eroded than the lower facade, establishes a vertical landmark within an otherwise modest street elevation.
Inside, the existing building is structured as a succession of narrow, tall rooms beneath pointed groin vaults. Survey photographs document painted masonry, arched openings, timber shutters, and several surviving fields of encaustic cement tile. The floors are particularly consequential: their geometric and floral patterns establish not only a decorative record but also a scale of inhabitation, marking rooms as distinct chambers within the long domestic sequence.
Because the project remains unbuilt, its architectural claims must be assessed across different forms of representation. The survey photographs reveal conditions of weathering, material loss, and spatial proportion; the drawings clarify the vault geometry, sectional height, and circulation; the visualizations describe a proposed atmosphere rather than a completed reality. This distinction matters, especially where the project retains traces of age in rendered interiors while introducing a substantially altered domestic program.
Vaults, Enfilade, and Spatial Reorganization
The plan concentrates kitchen, dining, and living functions along an aligned run of vaulted rooms. Rather than treating the historic partitions as fixed boundaries, the scheme reads the sequence as an enfilade, allowing arches to frame successive views through the house. This organization uses the depth of the existing plan as a compositional device, drawing sightlines from the street-facing rooms toward the courtyard and its larger arched opening.
Sections indicate clear heights of approximately five meters beneath the principal vaults. In a compact dwelling, this vertical dimension becomes the project’s most significant spatial resource. The pointed vaults reduce the perceived weight of the masonry overhead while making the rooms appear longer and more interconnected. Their repeated ribs provide a structural and visual rhythm that the new interior arrangement does not attempt to conceal.
Bedrooms, bathrooms, and a dressing room are organized around the central circulation and stair core on the principal plan level. The stair rises to the roof terrace rather than serving a separate upper residential floor, despite an earlier project description suggesting an upstairs bedroom arrangement. This single-level organization avoids fragmenting the domestic program and reserves the vertical journey for a transition from enclosed rooms to the open roofscape.
Material Continuity and Contemporary Insertions
Warm lime plaster is proposed as the principal surface treatment, extending across walls and vaults in tones that support the mineral character of the existing construction. Its intended unevenness is significant. Rather than using smooth, sealed finishes to establish a sharp contrast between old and new, the scheme permits mottling, repaired openings, and irregular wall planes to remain legible. Such an approach can maintain the perceptual depth of historic masonry, provided that repair work does not turn weathering into a decorative effect.
The floor strategy is more explicit in its relationship to the existing fabric. Decorative cement tiles are retained or reintroduced as inset fields within broader stone-grey surfaces, treating them as room-scale carpets rather than continuous finishes. This allows the dense patterns to register at thresholds, seating areas, and circulation zones without overwhelming the interior. It also recalls the existing floors, whose patterned borders historically gave each vaulted chamber a distinct visual frame.
New elements are designed as identifiable insertions. Steel-framed arched glazing opens the main living sequence to the patio, while deep green kitchen cabinetry, stone work surfaces, integrated fireplace elements, and suspended lighting introduce a contemporary domestic scale beneath the high vaults. The proposal is strongest where these additions remain materially distinct from the lime-plastered envelope, avoiding imitation of the historic details while working within their proportions.
Courtyard and Roofscape as Living Infrastructure
The existing walled garden is currently defined by citrus trees, rough stone paving, mature planting, and a sense of enclosure produced by adjoining buildings. The proposal recasts this area as a patio connected directly to the kitchen and living spaces. A tall arched glazed opening makes the courtyard a terminus for the interior enfilade, bringing daylight into the deep plan and allowing dining, planting, and informal gathering to extend beyond the envelope.
At roof level, the project introduces a small pool, shaded seating, dining space, and planted parapets around the retained raised volume. The terrace does not isolate itself from its context. Visualizations retain adjacent chimneys, parapets, service equipment, and the nearby church tower, acknowledging that the roof is part of a shared urban field rather than a detached private platform. This relationship is also visible in the existing-condition photographs, where the town’s roofs, aerials, and weathered walls form the immediate horizon.
Together, the patio and roof terrace redistribute domestic life across multiple microclimates. The courtyard offers shade, planting, and proximity to the kitchen at ground level, while the roof receives sun, air movement, and distant views. In Puglia’s hot, dry seasonal conditions, these exterior rooms can reduce reliance on a fully enclosed domestic routine, although their long-term performance will depend on careful detailing of drainage, irrigation, shading, and the added water load associated with the rooftop pool.
Credits and Additional Notes
- Other contributors: Esplendido Design – architecture, interior design, visualizations, and photography.
