A heating column exposed during demolition now sets the plan of House with a White Column, a Rome apartment that SET Architects turns into a pied-à-terre for a family of international clients.
A short walk from the Basilica of San Giovanni in Laterano, the flat answers to two kinds of occupant. It has to carry the owners’ daily life and also work as a temporary rental. The brief called for a home that is essential, calm and flexible, and the renovation takes that request at its word.
Only two things are fixed: the kitchen and the service core. Everything else stays open and adaptable. The kitchen, custom-made in natural oak, is less a room than a line drawn through the whole apartment, and the studio describes it as “a permeable domestic infrastructure”, one that runs from end to end and gives access to the service areas. A system of concealed doors closes over its working parts when they are not in use, so the cooking disappears and what remains is oak.
In the middle of the living area sits a monolithic microcement island with a table built into it. The studio sets it up as the centre of everyday life in the flat, the place where the household comes together.
Then there is the column. Part of the heating system, it came to light during demolition, and in the studio’s words it was “transformed from a constraint into the project’s defining element.” The whole layout is organised around it, and the white column becomes the anchor the eye and the plan keep returning to.
The palette keeps out of its way. The floor runs unbroken in microcement, the built-in furniture is natural oak, and every wall and ceiling is white. That is the full list, chosen to sharpen the sense of space and keep the rooms calm and luminous. Onorato di Manno and Andrea Tanci, who founded and direct the Rome studio, worked with Maria Lidia Tamburro on the project, which follows the studio’s Via Latina apartment of 2022, an earlier renovation in the same city. As a general approach, the studio says it draws on archetypal forms. Here the moves are few: a fixed kitchen and service core, cooking hidden behind concealed doors, and everything else arranged around a column the demolition exposed.
