In the discreet silence of the historic hamlet of Cisore, a mountain fraction near Domodossola, an old family home comes back to life thanks to the careful and poetic intervention of the ATOMAA studio. The house, once inhabited by the client’s grandparents and abandoned for over twenty years, preserves precious traces of the past within its walls. The project chose not only to respect these traces but to showcase them with contemporary sensitivity, transforming the entire dwelling into a place of memory and rebirth.
The most challenging element was the space. Like many traditional mountain houses, Casa Cisore was characterized by dark, cold, compartmentalized rooms, often not very functional for modern life. ATOMAA’s intervention reversed this condition, adopting a design vision based on light, openness, and connection. Large windows, new strategic openings, and measured construction solutions allowed for the restoration of depth and breath to the spaces, establishing a new relationship between interior and exterior.
The design approach was one of listening to the context and memory. The original elements – materials, proportions, textures – were preserved, reinterpreted, and enhanced: not as relics to be museum pieces, but as living signs capable of blending with a sober architectural language, characterized by balance and detail.
Today, the dwelling is permeated by a new light, which highlights its volumes and accompanies its inhabitants in a narrative of continuity and discreet transformation. The house shows how architecture can become a tool for caring for memory, a small refuge in the mountains that tells the story of those who lived there and those who inhabit it today, in a deep harmony between tradition and innovation, between intimacy and landscape.
ATOMAA
Founded in 2018 with offices in Milan and Edinburgh, the ATOMAA studio stands out for a profoundly human vision of architecture. Through constant dialogue with artisans, materials, and context, the team approaches each project as a cultural and relational process, where form is always the result of careful listening. The studio’s name itself, derived from the ancient Greek átomos, indicates the individual as the measure of building. Whether it’s a minimal scale or a more complex intervention, ATOMAA works to transform space into experience, blending beauty and design honesty.
For more info: www.atomaa.eu
CREDITS
Project: Casa Cisore
Architect: ATOMAA
Location: Domodossola (VB), Italy
Year: 2024
Photography: Alberto Strada
