Inside are memories that parents don’t want to lose: in the furniture, in the floors, in the corridors. The preservation of memory is a concrete need here, and an explicit request of the clients. On the other hand, the new inhabitants have their own aspirations.
What to keep of what is there, and how to make room for new needs and tastes? How to preserve the grace of the former interiors, despite the violence of the splitting of the apartment and of the radical modification of its spaces?
The project is reduced to the choice between three actions: removing, adding, preserving. From time to time these actions reveal nineteenth-century elements hidden by the previous renovation, they build rooms in the vast existing spaces, they maintain details, views, furnishings; unpredicted relationships are established between the spaces of the 60s, what remains of the 1800s, and what is needed now.
The apartment thus becomes an eloquent witness of moments of the past, of the sequence of generations, and of course of the present.