A three-storey stone house with shuttered windows on a wooded hillside above the valley

Rustico Sonogno

Location: Sonogno, Val Verzasca, Switzerland
Year: 2021
Type: Restoration
Area: 210 m²
Client: Private
Status: Completed 2021

A nineteenth-century stone house at the top of the valley, empty for forty years, made into a home without changing how it looks from the path.

Materials

Gneiss walls and slate roof, existing
Larch
Lime render
Blackened steel ties

When we first climbed into the hayloft, the roof was open in two places and the walls leaned out by a hand's width. We took the roof down slate by slate, tied the walls with steel inside the thickness of the stone, and put every slate back.

The new things are timber and easy to tell apart: a stair, a kitchen, window seats in the old openings. Nothing new touches the stone where it does not have to.

A dark hayloft with a stone floor, a timber ceiling, a single small window and one stool — Fig. 02The hayloft before the work began · Before, 2019

New windows sit inside the old openings, in larch left to grey. From the path the house looks the way it always has.

A rough stone pier beside a new timber window frame, with warm light inside — Fig. 03A new frame in an old opening · Gneiss, existing

An armchair and a small table in a deep arched window recess with white walls — Fig. 04A window seat in the seventy-centimetre wall

A dark timber stair rising beside a lit stone wall hung with small framed pictures — Fig. 05The new stair against the old wall