Architect：Margarete Architetti

Location：Tuscany, Montisi, Italy

Project Year：2015

Category：Hotels;Restaurants

If design and art makes part of your life, this is the place to be in Tuscany! An industrial hangar build amid the Tuscan countryside, views on the medieval ruins of montelifré and 2 km away from the small town of montisi: that’s what it was.

But the hangar became more since his building in the late sixties: from a fabric of clay pigeons it was converted in a body shop for cars, but no business was succesfull…so in 1999, the abandoned structure was bought by the Austrian sculpture Reinhold Traxl, and that’s where the art-hangar’s real story begins… Reinhold fell in love with the hangar for it’s simple cement construction with almost perfect proportions, neutral and functional, where the surrounding landscape flows into the interior and giving space to the essential: the Bauhaus ideology.

Being artist but also architect, together with his friend Peter Thurner, an Austrian architect, he created a ‘box’ concept , where big glass openings could be closed by movable, transparant iron curtains. They pulled in the outside landscape by creating terraces, which protect the residents from rain and sun. It is very rare to find such a modern interpretation of living in the Tuscan countryside, the more while it isn’t disturbing nature, but even bringing honour to it.

In 2013, Reinhold Traxl became very ill and he had to sell his ‘atelier-house’. However, also the new owner is a person with an open spirit and the same vision on ‘living’. For 2 years, JohnyThielens, Belgian living in Tuscany and with a passion for interior design, conducted the works for creating 2 new lofts. A mix of design, art and old recuperated materials, are making the hangar now an exclusive residence with 2 lofts, each 250 sqm, divided from each other by a polyvalent ‘open’ space from 200sqm.

In the garden there are still several sculptures from Reinholt, containers were rebuild to a guest bedroom and a lounge container, the old electrical tower became bathroom with a star gazing terrace on top, and the lap pool from 20 meter seems a block of marble smashed into the landscape, almost another piece of art…

So, ‘art-hangar’ is still a place for artists, for dreamers, for people with an open mind, in a word: for people daring to leave the beaten path…

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