Gabetti and Isola spent their lives building things that do not announce themselves. At Alba they made a courthouse in the shape of a hill; here, on the plain below the Monbracco, they made a house that looks like a farmstead. It is of the nineties and is the last chapter of a series of houses the two architects built in the Cuneo country from the fifties onwards.
What to see
The plan is an open court, laid out around a slightly concave elliptical space. The outer front is closed, the inner one is all glass and opens under a portico with a gently curved slope; the building turns towards itself, partly so as not to be disturbed by a haphazardly built context. Above the main body, of a single storey, rises a belvedere tower.
The materials come from the Piedmontese building tradition: stone masonry and exposed brick, a tile roof on a timber structure, copper gutters, wooden window frames. Even the brick vaulted ceilings of the entrance and the main rooms are borrowed from farmhouses. The corner blocks are rotated with respect to the long wings and have hipped roofs.
Visiting
It is a private house and cannot be visited. You see it from the road, at Barge, in the province of Cuneo; it is matter for those interested in architecture, not a destination with a ticket. Ten minutes.
Our editors' tip
Look at the wall along the road, in stone with courses of exposed brick and a projecting cornice. It is the part you can really see, and it is the gesture that explains everything: that wall does not stop where the house ends, it goes on and stretches out towards the fields. The building does not occupy the landscape, it hooks onto it.