Palazzo Nero

The client inherited the palazzo but had never lived in it. Four floors of faded frescoes, crumbling cornices, and rooms that had not been occupied in decades. The brief was straightforward: make it liveable without making it ordinary. Every surface was to feel earned, not applied. Every room was to carry both its history and its present without apology.

Located in the heart of the historic centre of Bologna, the palazzo faces a narrow medieval street that limits direct sunlight to a brief window each morning. We designed the entire spatial sequence to maximise these morning hours, orienting the primary living areas toward the east and using deep-set mirror panels within the original plasterwork reveals to extend that light far into the interior.

The material palette was divided between the preserved original fabric and a series of new insertions. We retained every surviving fresco, exposed the original terracotta floor throughout the ground level, and introduced new elements—kitchen, bathrooms, joinery—in a single material: dense black Absolute granite. The contrast is complete and deliberate. Old and new make no attempt to blend.

All furniture, lighting, and architectural metalwork was designed exclusively by our atelier and fabricated in Bologna by craftsmen who had worked on the palazzo's previous restoration decades earlier.

The residence holds its history without sentiment and its present without apology. It is, by any measure, one of the most resolved projects our atelier has completed.