Private house renovation, Breganzona

commissioned by: Construction Office of the Canton of Grisons

civil engineer: CSD Ingegneri SA, Lugano

chronology:

project: 2017
construction: 2018–2019
dimensions: 1500 mc sia

The house stands on the hillside of Breganzona and faces east over the city of Lugano and the gulf.

Designed at the beginning of the 1960s by the Roman architect Cecilia Varetti, probably one of the first women to have graduated in architecture in Italy in the 1950s, it is a modern house with an organic interior development, an architecture of great interest that is worth preserving and enhancing.

The house has never been seriously renovated since it was built and now many parts of it need to be restored.

The project involves renovating the existing house, redoing all the technical and sanitary installations, replacing the current window and door frames with new, better-performing triple-glazed ones, providing thermal insulation around most of the perimeter and renovating the roof by installing thicker thermal insulation.

Some internal modifications were also made:

The rooms in the basement, once occupied by the small service flat, are recovered as a living area, and the area of the current garage is added to create a small independent flat.

A new two-car garage is created within the existing volume of the cellar.

The main flat is slightly reorganised and renovated inside to make it more comfortable.

The building currently has an oil boiler, which is to be replaced by an air-water heat pump located in a special room in the cellar. Distribution will be by radiators on the first floor and by coils on the ground floor.