Speziale Wine Resort

The transformation of a residential building in the centre of Verduno gives rise to Speziale Wine Resort, a hospitality project for the Fratelli Alessandria family. The concept stems from Verduno Pelaverga “Speziale” and its aromatic world: spices, colours, art and landscape become the raw material of the design, building an identity that runs through the eight suites, the common areas, the garden and the SPA. The project rethinks the building as a whole, working simultaneously on the interior layout, the building envelope and the relationship with the ground. The lobby, the small tasting room and the new connections organise access to the eight suites, while the transformation of the outdoor spaces creates a more direct dialogue between each room and the landscape. On the uphill side, the reshaping of the ground brings the garden up to the level of the ground-floor rooms, giving each of them a private green space facing the castle. On the downhill side, the portico roof is transformed from its original curved clay-tile covering into a flat surface, creating two large private terraces for the upper-floor suites. Large custom-designed metal planters, filled with plants and aromatic species, line the terraces and carry the botanical theme that runs through the entire project onto the façade. A second element helps shape the building’s identity: the design of the balustrades. A sequence of vertical lines of varying thickness forms a kind of barcode that identifies Speziale. The same rhythm returns in the stairs and the fencing, turning functional and safety elements into a recurring graphic signature of the architecture. Inside, the common thread comes from Verduno Pelaverga “Speziale”, a wine from the Fratelli Alessandria winery, and its distinctive aromatic world. Each of the eight rooms is dedicated to a spice and develops its own identity from a reference colour. Its shades recur in the porcelain stoneware finishes, the walls, the textiles, the decorative elements and the lighting design, while the wooden floors provide a shared material base, relating different spaces to one another without making them uniform. Art, too, is conceived from the outset as part of the project. Henri Spaeti, the Swiss artist whose work appears on the historic label of Verduno Pelaverga Speziale, is involved from the earliest stages. For each suite he creates a specific work, placed on the headboard and developed in dialogue with the colour and the spice that identify the room. The artwork is therefore not added afterwards as decoration, but comes into being together with the space and helps define its character. The narrative continues into the landscape. Plants, aromatic herbs and botanical species carry the same sensory world of the interiors into the garden, establishing continuity between architecture and open space. Beneath the panoramic terrace, the SPA is set into the contours of the ground, almost like a space hidden in the garden. Directly connected to the pool and the sun deck, it includes a massage room and a glazed sauna looking out onto the greenery. Here too the spice theme returns through scents, materials and light, turning the aromatic suggestions of the wine into an experience devoted to wellbeing. Speziale thus interprets hospitality as an extension of wine culture. The “spiced elegance” of Verduno Pelaverga is not merely a narrative reference but becomes a design principle and an identity code: it runs through architecture, interior design, art and landscape, differentiating the spaces while bringing them together in a single story, rooted in Verduno and in the history of the Alessandria family.