Located in Brescia, Italy, Piano Nobile Loft & Round Wall Studio has been designed in 2019 by Ale Preda Architecture.

Description
This gut renovation opens up and modernizes the interiors of two apartments in a dilapidated historic Palazzo in Brescia, Italy, while restoring the original grandeur of the spaces. Interestingly, the units are positioned on subsequent floors, sharing, as it were, the same perimeter outline. By virtue of their different ceiling heights, however, they engender discrete architectural responses. On the second floor, the Piano Nobile Loft expands vertically, taking advantage of the 4.4-meter high ceiling. The Round Wall Studio, on the third floor, develops horizontally with a series of partial-height partitions. Both apartments were in a state of complete disrepair and were subdivided into multiple small rooms, many with no access to daylight.

Several of the most exciting features of the original architecture, such as the decorated primary beams and the coffered wood ceiling, were concealed by plaster-dropped ceilings and revealed themselves in the demolition phase.
Structurally, the apartments were unsound?the central wood beams spanning the Piano Nobile Loft’s width and the Round Wall Studio’s length were both sagging. In addition, several secondary beams had been haphazardly cut to make space for chimney flues and were unsupported. The installation of steel columns, brackets, and reinforced screed at ...