Vis-a-vis. Restoration of a Venetian Villa reworks Villa Dona in Costabissara as a legible ensemble of historical layers rather than as a return to a single-period image. The intervention focuses on the barchessa and its adjoining grounds, introducing new work, hospitality, and gathering spaces through a precise dialogue between rough masonry, exposed structural remnants, timber insertions, glass enclosures, and a restructured landscape.
Vis-a-vis. Restoration of a Venetian Villa Technical Information
- ArchitectsRigonSimonetti
- LocationCostabissara, Vicenza, Italy
- Gross Area821 m2 | 8,840 Sq. Ft.
- Project Years2019 – 2025
- Photographs© Rory Gardiner and Alberto Sinigaglia
“The reinterpretation of the villa stems from the awareness that this type of building, pervaded by time and lived experience, presents itself to us as a palimpsest, one that calls to be deciphered through our work and care.”
– Francesco Rigon and Margherita Simonetti
Reading the Villa as Palimpsest
The restoration of Villa Dona is grounded in a refusal to stabilize the complex around an idealized original condition. Instead, the project reads the villa and its barchessa as a construction altered repeatedly across centuries, with eighteenth and nineteenth-century interventions still visible in shifts of structure, proportion, and finish. This position is most evident in the treatment of the barchessa head facing the road, where rusticated stonework, weathered brick boundaries, and later modifications remain intact as historical evidence rather than background texture.
The architects reorganize damaged and inconsistent conditions into a clearer architectural order without suppressing their irregularity. Stripped wall sections expose ancient timber fragments lodged within masonry, rough lime finishes register the uneven substrate beneath, and surviving arches are allowed to retain their partial discontinuities. The effect is not picturesque ruin but disciplined legibility. Materials are sorted and clarified so that masonry reads as mass, timber as inserted or residual structure, plaster as a veil, and new components as distinct actors in the composition.
This approach gives time an active role in the project. Surfaces are neither fully repaired nor theatrically distressed. In the cafe and upper workspaces, whitewashed brick, rough lime coatings, exposed roof structures, and repaired openings make the building’s temporal depth spatially present. Restoration here operates less as recovery than as interpretation, where the building is understood through what has been added, removed, worn down, and adapted.
New Insertions and the Ethics of Contrast
The new interventions are deliberately separate from the historic fabric in both material language and tectonic logic. The recessed wood-and-glass enclosure, inserted behind the stone colonnade of the portico, establishes this principle with precision. It creates a new interior boundary while leaving the Tuscan columns visually autonomous, so the old loggia remains readable as a former exterior space. Iron bracing, light timber frames, and transparent infill form a contemporary structural layer that neither imitates the masonry order nor competes with it monumentally.
The central arch on the street facade intensifies this strategy. A suspended wooden-and-glass box is placed within the glazed opening as an object-like insertion, aligned with the public garden and visible from the road. Its rectangular geometry sits in tension with the rusticated arch and mascaron keystone, producing a measured contrast between carved stone mass and lightweight timber enclosure. This is the project’s clearest statement that continuity with heritage need not depend on stylistic resemblance. Proportion, placement, and spatial reciprocity replace mimicry.
Elsewhere, details show a similar ethical discipline. The concrete stair, cast in MDF formwork, bears the trace of its making in fine horizontal striations, while Vicenza stone treads sit atop as a calibrated layer rather than a concealment. Detached service volumes in the cafe maintain distance from the perimeter walls, preserving the historic shell as an independent presence. On the upper floor, new partitions are supported by reinforced concrete frames, ensuring stability without invasive reinforcement of the old masonry. Contrast is therefore not an aesthetic effect alone but a method for distinguishing necessity, support, enclosure, and inheritance.
Programmatic Reuse and Spatial Reorganization
The former service wing is recast as a mixed-use environment in which public, collective, and productive programs are carefully distributed across the existing volumes. The ground floor of the barchessa accommodates the most accessible functions. A double-height cafe occupies the street-facing portion, using a large arch and built-in seating to establish visual exchange with the settlement beyond. Adjacent to it, the enclosed loggia serves as a conference and event hall, where the former portico condition remains legible through the retained column line and the recessed glazed plane.
The project relies on sectional variation and threshold control rather than on extensive subdivision. Changes in height, enclosure, and acoustic character organize the transition from public gathering to focused work. The upper level, reached through the inserted stair in the former caretaker’s dwelling, opens first onto views back into the double-height space below and then extends into coworking, meeting, and office areas. The glazed volume within the old portico hosts more collective work settings, while enclosed rooms deeper in the barchessa support private offices and smaller workspaces. This arrangement treats the inherited structure as a gradient of exposure and retreat.
Interior elements function architecturally rather than decoratively. Counters, benches, cabinetry, vestibules, and service blocks are conceived as freestanding or lightly attached volumes that shape circulation and use while preserving the perception of the larger historical rooms. In the cafe, the okoume furnishings and vestibule define occupation without erasing the arches and masonry envelope. In the offices, wood-and-glass partitions subdivide space while allowing the brick spine wall, roof structure, and arched openings to remain the primary spatial armature. Programmatic reuse is therefore achieved through insertion and calibration, not by saturating the old fabric.
Landscape, Thresholds, and Settlement Relations
The intervention extends well beyond the buildings, treating the 8,840-square-meter site as a set of differentiated grounds tied to distinct territorial conditions. The west edge facing the road becomes an urban threshold, where garden treatment, gravel surfaces, and concrete edging mediate between public circulation and the restored barchessa facade. This edge is not simply an access zone. It is the point at which the complex reenters civic life, and the suspended box in the central arch reinforces that exchange by turning the facade into an inhabited interface.
To the south, the villa addresses the nineteenth-century park through a quieter and more residential landscape. Existing mature trees and the romantic character of the grounds are maintained, while the former fountain is repurposed as a rainwater basin, edged for use and occupation. A circular, stabilized gravel surface, slightly displaced from the basin axis, creates a secondary geometry within the park and frames a resting place oriented toward both the building and the garden. These operations are modest in form yet significant in spatial effect, because they convert residual open space into a sequence of inhabitable clearings.
The north and east sides recover the site’s productive dimension. A rural court accommodates parking and service functions without severing the memory of the working estate, while the brolo is reestablished through rows of hazel and fruit trees set out in a regular grid. Paths in stabilized gravel and pale permeable concrete tie these landscapes together, supported by hedges and planting that define edges without hard closure. The new annex participates in this territorial logic as a contemporary barchessa, positioned as part building and part landscape marker. Through these calibrated grounds, adaptive reuse is understood not only as the conversion of structures but as the reconstruction of relationships between architecture, settlement, and cultivated land.
About RigonSimonetti
Founded in 2019 in Vicenza by Francesco Rigon and Margherita Simonetti, RigonSimonetti is an architectural firm focused on the recovery and reinterpretation of built heritage. The practice works across reuse and restoration, as well as new construction, open spaces, and interiors, pursuing an approach that balances continuity with tradition and the unexpected.
Credits and Additional Notes
- Architecture & site supervision: RigonSimonetti – Francesco Rigon, Margherita Simonetti
- Structural engineers: Nicola Caleca
- MEP consultants: Christian Castellani, electrical and mechanical engineering, fire safety
- Landscape designers: Giacomo Casentini
- Client: Officina 27 Srl / Parco delle Stagioni Srl impresa sociale
- Construction company: General Contract Costruzioni Srl
- Construction cost: €3.4 million
- Design phase: December 2019 – May 2025
- Construction: October 2020 – May 2025
- Opening: June 2025
- Other contributors: Francesco Novello, safety coordinator
- Other contributors: Rory Gardiner and Alberto Sinigaglia, photography
- Other contributors: The Architecture Curator
