Nestled in the Po Valley, at the gates of a rural town and overlooking a watercourse, Villa Orizzonte extends like a silent line that engages with the landscape without ever overpowering it. Designed by UNICA Architects – a studio founded by Lorenzo Capucci and Riccardo Robustini, with offices in Bologna and Dubai – the residence is conceived as an essential gesture, capable of combining a sense of place with contemporary language.
The new single-story building echoes the footprint of an old rural structure, transforming it into architecture that contemplates the dimensions of time and space. The roof becomes the “fifth facade” of the project: an articulated surface alternating solid and voids, creating courtyards, openings, and shaded areas that amplify the relationship between built form and nature.
The villa consists of two distinct volumes. The first, clad in stone, houses the garage, service rooms, and a private studio; the second, characterized by a visual lightness, contains the main living spaces. The living room, kitchen, and sleeping area open outward through large sliding glass doors, transforming the house into a terrace immersed in greenery. The structure is conceived as a porous box, punctuated by a sequence of internal courtyards: small domestic landscapes that create an inhabited rhythm of pauses, transitions, and sudden vistas.
Inside, the architectural journey unfolds dynamically, offering changing perspectives and visual relationships between spaces. Materials such as stone, wood, and plaster blend with the surrounding vegetation, emphasizing an idea of architecture as a natural extension of the landscape.
UNICA Architects is an architecture studio with offices in Bologna and Dubai. Founded by Lorenzo Capucci and Riccardo Robustini, the studio is active in residential, cultural, and urban projects, exploring the dialogue between construction and context, material and light, memory and future. The studio’s philosophy is based on the idea of architecture as a tool for storytelling and transformation, capable of generating new ways of inhabiting through a careful reading of the place.
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CREDITS
Project: Villa Orizzonte
Architects: Lorenzo Capucci, Riccardo Robustini
Team: Giulia Arduini
Location: Ferrara, Italy
Year: 2021
Photographs: Mariella Apollonio
