Our latest apartment in Turin is on Living, Corriere della Sera, January/February 2025 issue.
Words: Lia Ferrari
Photos: Danilo Scarpati
Certain recurring motifs in their work have set a precedent, such as the metal structures in plain sight or the dividing elements, always in metal, with which they articulate the spaces, but as good creatives they do not like to repeat themselves. When the first imitations, more or less conscious, began to circulate, the Marcante-esta studio, namely Andrea Marcante and Adelaide Testa, continued to surprise by always inventing something new. It is not surprising that the IED in Turin, whose headquarters they have recently redesigned, has entrusted them with the coordination of the Interior Design department. A subject that they take very seriously, interpreting it as research, invention, craftsmanship, thoughtful choices and cultured references, not without a subtle irony that occasionally takes refuge in the surreal.
This Turin house was designed for a couple of long-time clients, Marco Lobina and his wife Isabella Errani, he the founder of Rezina, a resin coating company, she the owner of a well-known public relations agency. There was great harmony, the architects say, so it was possible to experiment. They chose to play with the pre-existing features, in this specific case an authorial genius loci: the building where the apartment is located was built in 1958 based on a design by Ada Bursi, the first woman to join the Order of Architects of Turin.
Bursi worked in the Municipality, in the public works office. Evidently, at that time, opening a studio would have been too complicated for a woman. To build this house in the Crimea neighborhood, where she would later live, she and other employees joined together in a cooperative. The project has brilliantly stood the test of time. “Before buying, Marco and Isabella asked us for an opinion,” Andrea and Adelaide recall, “and it was an immediate yes, we had no doubts.” It’s also a question of details, which here are very refined: “Bursi gave the building a very strong imprint. She spoke of democratic luxury, economically realized. She used brick, mosaic and glass blocks sparingly and at the same time with great elegance».
It is this taste for detail that inspired the new floors developed with Rezina by Marcante-Testa, in clear resin with ribs in Bisazza mosaic tiles that recall the coverings of the balcony and the common areas of the building. A quote that is at the same time an invention.
If Ada Bursi dictated the tone, the project by Andrea Marcante and Adelaide Testa also pays homage to another female architect, Maria Grazia Conti Daprà, who lived in this apartment and designed the interiors. It was she who commissioned the wardrobe columns in the living room. As well-made as they were, another architect would have suggested making them disappear, but Marcante-Testa decided to keep them and artfully modify them to give them coherence.
«They are useful and beautiful, throwing them away would have made no sense», they say. «It is a question of the designer’s responsibility. We should always be concerned with avoiding waste, especially when there are valuable elements like these.” The stroke of genius is the metal inserts in the base to fill the gap that was created by eliminating an old platform. For the same reason, a marble step was added to the staircase leading to the attic. “Lately there has been a tendency to redo the past, certain things you can’t tell if they were done now or in the 1950s. Here we already had the past, and it had to stay. It was a matter of reinterpreting it in an original form: an interior design project should always tell something new as well.”