Casa Continua: A Rome Apartment Rebuilt Around Its Kitchen

Interiors · Rome

Reading Time: 8 minutes

After thirty years in the same Flaminio apartment, STUDIOTAMAT’s client had one complaint about the home she knew best: the kitchen had been pushed to its edges. STUDIOTAMAT’s answer was to move it to the centre and enclose it in burgundy glazed glass, turning the room she used least into the one she now uses most. The four architects behind the project call it the engine of conviviality.

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Introduction

Casa Continua occupies 115 square metres in Rome’s Flaminio district, inside a residential building whose rationalist entrance hall sets the tone before a visitor reaches the front door. Flaminio sits north of the historic centre, between the Tiber and the Villa Borghese, a district built up largely through the twentieth century and known today as much for its cultural buildings, MAXXI and the Auditorium Parco della Musica among them, as for the rationalist apartment blocks that surround them. The building Casa Continua occupies belongs to that second, quieter category: handsome, disciplined, unremarkable from the street, the kind of Roman apartment building that gives nothing away about what has been done inside.

The apartment itself is not new to its owner. She has lived there for more than thirty years, long enough to know exactly which parts of the layout had stopped working and long enough to have a clear view on how to fix them. That is a different starting point from most residential commissions, where a client is imagining a life they have not yet lived in a space. Here, the brief came from three decades of lived experience, which is part of why the result reads less like a proposal and more like a correction.

STUDIOTAMAT, the Rome practice of Tommaso Amato, Matteo Soddu, Valentina Paiola and Alice Patrizi, was brought in to correct one decision in particular. The original layout had treated the kitchen as a service room, small and set apart from the rest of the home, built for a way of living that no longer matched how its owner actually spent her time. The renovation’s central move, the one that gives the apartment its argument, is what happened when that kitchen was pulled into the middle of the plan and rebuilt as a room worth spending time in.

Casa Continua: a kitchen moved to the centre of the home

The kitchen at Casa Continua is enclosed by custom-made glazed partitions in burgundy-framed metal, fitted with textured glass screens rather than solid walls. The colour is carried through in a deep burgundy ceiling above the cooking area, set against pale yellow cabinetry and a floor of geometric terrazzo tiles from D’Ascenzi, a material chosen specifically to mark the kitchen out from the parquet running through the rest of the apartment. Pendant lighting by &Tradition is kept deliberately plain, so the room’s material language, not its fittings, does the work.

The glazing is the decision that matters. A solid wall would have restored the separation the client wanted removed. Glass keeps the kitchen visually open to the living and dining spaces around it while still giving the room its own identity, its own colour, its own floor. It is enclosed and connected at the same time, which is precisely the brief: a kitchen that no longer hides at the edge of the home but does not simply dissolve into an open-plan living room either. It stays a distinct, considered space. It is just no longer a hidden one.

That burgundy glass is also where the record needs correcting. Earlier coverage of the apartment has described this element as a burgundy-toned wallpaper. It is not paper. It is glazed glass set into custom metal framing, a structural and spatial decision rather than a decorative finish, and the distinction matters: a wallpaper covers a wall that was always going to be there, while a glazed partition is what created the room in the first place.

Achieving that meant real structural work, not a cosmetic refit. Moving a kitchen to the centre of an existing apartment plan means running new services, plumbing, extraction, power, through walls and floors that were not built to carry them there, and it means the load-bearing logic of the original apartment has to be respected even as the rooms around it are rearranged. None of that is visible in the finished space, which is exactly the point. A visitor sees a glazed pavilion of a kitchen sitting comfortably at the heart of the plan, as if it had always been there. What they do not see is the extent to which “always been there” is the result rather than the starting condition.

The engine of conviviality

Valentina Paiola, one of the four partners at STUDIOTAMAT, has described the brief in terms that make the design argument explicit. The client called the original kitchen’s isolation “the most significant mistake” of the apartment’s earlier design. “We reversed that logic,” Paiola has said, “transforming it into the engine of conviviality.” That phrase is worth sitting with, because it names what the whole renovation is actually about. This is not a story of restraint for its own sake. It is a story about correcting a specific, long-standing frustration, and doing it by giving the kitchen more presence rather than less.

STUDIOTAMAT is a Rome-based practice with a run of residential projects across the city and its surroundings, including Villa ai Castelli Romani and Villino Liberty Trastevere, both renovations of existing buildings rather than new-builds, which fits a practice whose recurring subject is how a home that already has a history gets asked to work harder for the people living in it now. Casa Continua’s completion, credited to the same four-strong founding team, extends that pattern into an apartment that had never structurally changed since its owner first moved in.

The practice’s name gives away its method. STUDIOTAMAT’s projects tend to treat an existing building’s character as the material to work with rather than the obstacle to clear away, which is why the parquet at Casa Continua survives untouched while the kitchen around it was rebuilt from the studs out. That is a harder discipline than it sounds. It would have been simpler, and arguably cheaper, to strip the apartment back to a blank shell and start again. Keeping the floor, the proportions and the entrance hall’s rationalist detailing intact, while making one deliberate, structurally significant change at the centre of the plan, is a more precise kind of renovation, one that treats the client’s thirty years in the building as information worth keeping rather than a problem to erase.

The kitchen’s centrality was not the only fragmentation the original plan created. Rigid room hierarchies elsewhere in the apartment had left the living areas feeling more compartmentalised than the building’s proportions really called for, and part of STUDIOTAMAT’s brief was restoring a dialogue between the rooms and the person actually living among them, not simply refinishing surfaces.

What stays: the parquet and the Camaleonda sofas

Not everything at Casa Continua was rebuilt, and the parts that were kept are as considered as the parts that were not. The original parquet flooring runs through the living and dining spaces untouched, its patina left visible rather than sanded back to a uniform finish, and it is what ties the two principal rooms together as the plan moves between them.

The living room is furnished around a set of Camaleonda sofas, Mario Bellini’s modular seating system for B&B Italia, first designed in 1970 and still in production today for exactly the reason it was chosen here: its soft, sculptural upholstered units can be arranged and rearranged rather than fixed to one configuration, which suits a room built for informal use over decades rather than a single first impression. Overhead, Artemide’s Tolomeo Mega Floor, designed by Michele De Lucchi and Giancarlo Fassina, provides directional light with its long articulated arm, while a pair of Nessino table lamps, Giancarlo Mattioli’s 1965 design for the same manufacturer, add smaller, warmer points of light rather than a single dominant source.

Furnished with named pieces, not showroom stock

The dining area continues the parquet from the living room, keeping the two spaces visually continuous, but introduces its own furniture language. The chairs are Libellula, designed by Giovanni Carini for the Italian manufacturer Planula in the 1970s, a lightweight, sculptural design that has since become a sought-after piece among collectors of Italian furniture, and its presence here places genuine design history in daily use rather than in a cabinet. Above the table hangs Foscarini’s Caboche Plus Grande, designed by Patricia Urquiola and Eliana Gerotto, its cluster of glass spheres catching and scattering light rather than directing it.

Textiles do a quieter version of the same job. Curtains in Fischbacher fabrics filter the Roman daylight without blocking it outright, and custom benches upholstered in l’Opificio fabrics appear in more than one room, giving the apartment a consistent material vocabulary that reads as considered rather than repetitive. In the reading area, a custom bench in a coral-toned fabric sits beneath a Dioscuri lamp, Michele De Lucchi and Giancarlo Fassina’s 1972 design for Artemide, chosen here for the soft, diffused light that suits a corner meant for pausing rather than passing through.

The private rooms

The master bedroom is treated differently from the rest of the apartment, and deliberately so. Wallpaper from Harlequin Fabrics wraps the room, creating an enclosed, cocooning feel that contrasts with the openness built into the living spaces. Light comes from a VL45 Radiohus pendant, Vilhelm Lauritzen’s 1945 design for the Danish Radio concert hall in Copenhagen, produced today by Louis Poulsen, chosen for a warm, diffused glow rather than direct illumination. The wardrobes are finished in l’Opificio fabric, the third room in the apartment to use the supplier, which by this point reads as a deliberate thread rather than a coincidence of specification.

The contrast between the bedroom and the kitchen is worth stating plainly, because it shows the same design team working in two different registers within a few metres of each other. The kitchen is glazed, sociable and lit for activity. The bedroom is wrapped, textured and lit for rest. Neither register is applied to the whole apartment indiscriminately. Each room’s material treatment answers a question about how it is actually used, which is a more disciplined approach than simply carrying one palette through every space for the sake of visual consistency, and it is the clearest evidence that the apartment’s various finishes were chosen with real intent rather than assembled from a single moodboard.

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Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

Casa Continua’s real subject is not restraint, and it is not nostalgia for the apartment’s original parquet and proportions, even though both survive intact. It is a specific correction, made after thirty years of living with a mistake, and the confidence to fix it by giving the kitchen more presence rather than tidying it quietly out of the way. STUDIOTAMAT’s decision to enclose that kitchen in glass rather than either walling it off completely or removing the separation altogether is the kind of detail that only makes sense once you know what problem it was solving. Once you do, the rest of the apartment, the kept parquet, the Camaleonda sofas, the Libellula chairs bought new life next to sixty-year-old ones, reads less like a mood board and more like an argument about how a long-held home should change.