CLOSE TO THE WIND
An Italian architect embraces timehonoured local traditions to create a spectacular Sicilian hillside retreat that easily adapts to the dramatic elements.
An Italian architect embraces timehonoured local traditions to create a spectacular Sicilian hillside retreat that easily adapts to the dramatic elements
noto in the south east of Sicily is a bewitching place, with late Baroque buildings made of a pale-golden local stone that glows in the sun. Considered a triumph of 18th-century town planning, the UNESCO-listed town is revered for its architectural harmony and theatrical perspectives. But when industrial designer Gordon Guillaumier first saw Sicily’s ‘golden city’ in 1991, it was in a sorry state. The streets were deserted and buildings were propped up with scaffolding to save them from toppling after an earthquake the year before that measured 5.1 on the Richter scale. “It was quite spooky but so transporting, it felt like being in a theatre set,” says Guillaumier. “I fell in love immediately.” A student at the time, in Milan on his way home to Malta, Guillaumier dreamed about one day “planting a flag there”. Over the next decade and a half Guillaumier visited Sicily several times as he forged a career in Milan designing furniture, tableware and light fittings for such big name Italian brands as Moroso, Minotti and Foscarini. He harboured a passion for architecture, which found a creative outlet when he bought that dreamed-for plot of land overlooking the coast near Noto and built himself a cabin-style retreat. The spartan holiday house led to commissions for three more in Val di Noto and architectural recognition. “The design world is the real DNA of my office and my creativity,” the designer says, “but through this little adventure something unexpected has sprouted.” Guillaumier’s first house wasn’t much bigger than the cabana next to the lava-stone-lined swimming pool of the six-bedroom villa he completed last year for Italians who live in the south of France. Yet the underlying principles are the same. “I feel that my competence cannot go beyond something that I can imagine from a personal point of view so I design my houses very much in the way I would live in them,” the designer says. He considers the outdoors as much as in, and designs it in totality using industrial povera (poor) materials like concrete and raw iron combined with local stone and tiles. With Casa del Vento (house of the wind), the biggest challenge was downplaying the imposing 270-square-metre structure. His client wanted to site the house on the hilltop but Guillaumier insisted it be
just underneath. “Whatever I do I try to make it fit in as much as possible so that it looks good and it ages properly and becomes an idiom of the landscape.” The terrain is rocky and uncompromising, buffered by strong winds off the Ionian Sea and baked by hot sun in the summer months. “The heat, the wind, they all have to be tackled to make the house liveable even in extreme conditions,” says Guillaumier. Instead of air conditioning he relied on “primitive intelligence” from local farmers to deal with the elements; four men toiled for months making walls of golden Noto stone for privacy, wind protection and shade. “These rubble walls are something that belong to the local vernacular, which we have reimported into our contemporary projects,” he says. “They’re simple solutions, which can be very meaningful, ecological, and they fit in properly because they’re part of the context.” The dry stone walls are a natural foil for a 30-metre-long steel awning suspended over the roof of the house. “I call it the whale’s grill because you can roast a whale on it,” Guillaumier jokes. The blades are angled so that the sun at its zenith projects beams of light onto ››
‹‹ the house and stone terraces. As the sun moves, the shadows close to block the light completely. “But you’re still seeing the sky and there’s this sense of openness. It’s an important element and it creates a kind of drama, apart from the function.” Inside the house Guillaumier put his contemporary twist on the most traditional of local crafts, lining a wall of the living room with burnt-ochre and pale-blue majolica tiles from nearby Caltagirone, one of Sicily’s famed ceramic towns. “I like to bring the past into the present in these projects,” he says. Guillaumier deliberately kept the interiors sparse, mixing up tobacco-and-grey vintage Eames chairs in the kitchen for a more informal feel. “If you do everything and there isn’t a space even for a little stool then it’s a pity that a project cannot carry on living.” Nature must also take its course. Guillaumier wants the house to be “eaten up by vegetation” and in harmony with the plants he put around it. “A successful project is one that looks good when it’s fifinished and looks even better when it gets old.”