Border House

Border House | Italy | 2024
[LCA Architetti]

Noemi and Marco are a young couple of border workers, who decided to build their home in a small town on Lake Lugano, bordering Ticino: Porto Ceresio, near Varese. Their main goal was always to create a home with spaces that could have a strong relationship with nature and the surrounding landscape, featuring the beautiful Pre Alps mountains marking the horizon on the lake.

This house represents our successful attempt at building a “non-traditional” home in a sustainable way. A home built on the border between Italy and Switzerland, but also on the philosophical border dividing those who believe nothing should change and those who are willing to experiment with solutions aimed at facing the current climate crisis.

The owners made a conscious and brave choice, intended to prove that it’s possible to build with materials that aren’t necessarily concrete and bricks. This allowed us to use our craft to imagine a more sustainable world.

The owners’ great passion for the environment allowed us to experiment with natural materials that are still severely underused.

The house has a rectangular floorplan and is built on a garden plot surrounded by detached houses. The ground floor features an entrance, a kitchen with a central island and breakfast area, a living area with a dining table, a bathroom and two separate bedrooms for the couple’s children. The first floor overlooks the living room, and it’s entirely taken up by the master bedroom and en-suite bathroom; the en suite shower is lit exclusively through zenith lighting.

The house features open spaces and encourages conviviality; family members can interact from different rooms at the two different levels, through elements and spaces that are in part shared.

The main features in the house are the two-level living area and the big staircase linking the two storeys; this is almost a sculpture, built with pleated wood and painted anthracite grey. The feature set against the living area wall (which was originally conceived as a staircase / bookcase) completely fills the height of the space, creating a dialogue between the contrasting ceramic volumes of the backsplash and the big porthole opening up to the mountains.

The house’s utility consumption is low, as it features a heating system paired with a controlled mechanical ventilation system. Overall consumption is further reduced through a solar panel system.

The nature surrounding all spaces inspired the owners’ intention to create a truly sustainable building: a house made of wood, metal and cork.

The building’s foundation is reinforced and compacted concrete, which rises above the ground by about 50 cm. Above it lays the wooden frame structure of the house.

In the interior, the dividing panelling is made of fibre plaster, whereas the finishings feature oak parquet and tiles in varying sizes.

On the outside, the entire ground floor is clad in cork – the material was left uncovered and pantographed. This decoration is simple and elegant, and it adds elegance to the external volume, which would otherwise be too austere. On the first floor, the vertical walls and pitched roof are both covered in anthracite standing seam metal.

The materials and colour palette of the house create a dialogue with the mountains surrounding the valley; colours blend in with the trees and rocks in the surrounding landscape.

It seems almost paradoxical that such a unique house, so starkly different from its neighboring ones, almost disappears by camouflaging amidst the surrounding landscape. Text description by the architects.