Borgo Banditaccia | Edoardo Milesi & Archos

Set along the ridge of a Maremma hillside, between two valleys and beneath the distant gaze of the fortress of Magliano in Toscana, Borgo Banditaccia returns to existence as a unified organism. A place that for over a century shaped the agricultural landscape — first as a territorial landmark, later as an isolated fragment — today is reborn through a project that is at once architectural, landscape-based and deeply human.

The regeneration of Borgo Banditaccia is not a simple renovation: it is an act of reconciliation between what remains of rural memory and a renewed idea of dwelling. The project takes as its generative core the only still-authentic portion of the original complex — the vaulted cart sheds and the compact northern volume — preserving their material substance and character, not out of nostalgia, but as the foundation on which to build a new continuity.

All that had accumulated over time in a disorderly, fragile and low-quality manner has been demolished and reassembled into a new balance. The volumes reconnect along the historic axis, orthogonal to the ridge, forming a compact yet porous organism, capable of engaging with sun, wind, shadow and distance.

The skyline of the complex becomes a carefully calibrated score: pitched roofs, terraces and flat roofs alternate, generating a restrained rhythm that avoids any desire for prominence and instead establishes a measured relationship with the horizon. Light is never displayed overtly; it is filtered, carved out, set vibrating across surfaces through solids and voids, deep shadows and sudden cuts.

Three materials guide the entire project like an essential grammar: local stone, reclaimed brick and exposed, integrally coloured concrete. These are primary, earthbound materials, never reduced to mere cladding. Stone is not decoration but structure; brick carries with it the time and labour of building; concrete, rendered tactile through exposed aggregates, becomes a contemporary reinterpretation of the whitewashed historic masonry. Together, they create surfaces that vibrate and shift with the hours of the day and the changing seasons.

The tension between interior and exterior is constant. Openings never follow the stereotype of the window — except in the historic volume. Small apertures, slits and large glazed surfaces alternate to control views and protect intimacy, while window frames recessed within the thickness of the walls eliminate reflections on the landscape, allowing the hillside to remain the true protagonist.

Between the residential core and the building housing the pool and fitness area lies a pergola wrapped in wisteria and Virginia creeper: a vegetal filter, an outdoor living room, a secret and fragrant garden. It is an intermediate space, suspended between architecture and nature, where time slows and shade becomes material.

The entire layout behaves like a small Mediterranean village: compact, composed of narrow paths, closely set volumes, shaded spaces and sudden openings, where form is never arbitrary but arises from a balance between protection and openness, between mass and breath.
The indoor pool, housed within the volume of the former stable, also preserves the typological memory of agricultural outbuildings, translating it into a contemporary language. Its double-curved concrete envelope works in tandem with zenithal light and natural ventilation to create a passive environment capable of self-regulation without the need for invasive mechanical systems. It is an architecture that does not merely consume energy, but governs it, retains it and gives it back.

Here, sustainability is not proclaimed as a slogan but practiced through the use of local materials, dry construction techniques, timber prefabrication, rainwater harvesting and the restoration of the site’s original contour lines. The project does not add, but reorders; it does not overlap, but stitches back together.

Borgo Banditaccia thus becomes a small community of dwelling: an agriturismo composed of a caretaker’s house, six compact apartments, shared communal spaces, places for relationship and for silence. A place where living is not separated from the landscape, but continuously measured against it. A project in which architecture does not impose itself, but settles gently. It works through subtraction rather than accumulation. It returns form to the hillside, rhythm to the light, truth to the material. Borgo Banditaccia is not conceived to be looked at, but to be lived in. Not as an iconic object, but as a concrete desire for a different life — slower, more rooted, more aware.