Panoramic Suite Red

On the first floor of the former school of Pensoglio, the Red Suite is a single room where sleeping area, living space and kitchenette coexist without partitions: a terracotta wall, Hungarian-point oak flooring, a solid timber headboard and a French window framing the vineyards of Monforte d’Alba and Novello. The suite comes from joining two classrooms. Instead of reintroducing corridors and doors, the project controls the space through colour and a few built elements: the terracotta wall wraps the sleeping area and the kitchen block, while light plaster holds the opposite side, where the seating and the writing desk are. The solid oak headboard is not only furniture: it is a low screen that separates the bed from the entrance to the bathroom without closing the view, and it echoes the species of the herringbone floor running through the whole suite. The stone-clad bathroom opens behind this filter. The kitchenette is built into a continuous dark front that absorbs appliances and storage, leaving the room the character of a living space. It is the same logic as the black kitchen on the ground floor, applied at a smaller scale. A library devoted to Barolo, an Underwood typewriter, film graphics and a warm, low light designed for the evening complete the room. The French window on the short side, with its direct outlook over the vineyards and the village, is the element the entire room is oriented around. Like the rest of the house, the suite runs almost entirely on energy produced on site by the building’s photovoltaic system with storage.