In Costabissara, Vicenza, RigonSimonetti restores Villa Doná and its barchessa as a layered adaptive reuse, converting the service wing into a café, offices, and event hall while preserving every historical stratum.
The guiding principle at Costabissara is something Francesco Rigon and Margherita Simonetti describe as reading a building as a palimpsest: taking seriously what was added, removed, worn down, and adapted across time rather than stabilising the complex around a single idealized period. In the barchessa, that position produces surfaces where 18th and 19th-century interventions survive intact, weathered brick boundaries remain unwashed, and stripped wall sections expose ancient timber fragments lodged within masonry. The effect is disciplined rather than picturesque.
The exterior makes the contrast explicit. From the garden side, the barchessa's Tuscan column arcade now carries a glass and light-timber infill set behind the column line, so the old portico remains readable as a former exterior space. On the street facade, a glass-and-wood box suspended within the rusticated central arch sits as an object inside the opening, rectangular against the carved stone, the mascaron keystone unchanged above it. The new annex to the north reads differently still: sandblasted white concrete planes and a terracotta roof tile, contemporary forms that neither mimic the masonry order nor compete with it.
Inside, the double-height cafe occupies the street-facing portion. The brick spine walls are whitewashed, the arched openings retained with partial discontinuities intact. Okoume furnishings and a vestibule define the café occupation without filling the historic envelope. Overhead, a new timber roof structure spans the space in pale spruce, its rafters exposed and shadow-casting. The upper coworking level is reached through a stair inserted into the former caretaker's dwelling; the landing opens first onto views back into the double-height space, then continues into enclosed offices behind oak and glass partitions.
One interior move concentrates everything: a new oak door cut into a lime-washed wall, its fanlight a curved tracery arch recovered from the existing fabric, exposed ancient timber lodged in the rough masonry above. New plaster in warm off-white covers one face; raw stone sits two metres away. The room holds both without forcing resolution.
"The reinterpretation of the villa stems from the awareness that this type of building, pervaded by time and lived experience, reads as a palimpsest of interventions layered over time," the studio notes. The project carries that statement into every surface decision, from the sandblasted concrete stair treads set atop Vicenza stone to the cast concrete parapets that edge the restored garden. Restoration here is understood as continuation, not recovery.
