Art Nouveau Villino — Full Restoration

The opportunity presented itself as a single very large apartment — 358 square metres on the fourth floor of a rationalist building dating from the late 1930s, with views across the roofscape of the inner city towards the Alps on clear days. The asking price reflected the difficulty of selling a property of this scale to a single buyer in the current market.

The architectural analysis identified a clear subdivision strategy based on the structural grid and the position of the two existing lift cores. The floor plate allowed for two independent apartments of 170 and 188 square metres respectively, each with its own entrance directly from the lift landing, a distinct outlook, and a spatial sequence that did not require either unit to compromise on ceiling height, natural light or room proportion.

The project was managed from acquisition through planning consent and construction supervision. The structural intervention was minimal — confined to the creation of a new party wall along a line already implied by the building’s own logic. Both apartments were completed to a shell standard, allowing future owners to determine their own interior fit-out within a spatially resolved and architecturally coherent envelope.

Both units were placed under offer within six weeks of completion, at a combined value significantly above the original acquisition and construction cost. More significantly, both buyers described their purchase as unlike anything else they had encountered in their search — a response that reflects the relative scarcity of genuinely well-proportioned residential space at this scale in the city.