At Casa Barro, a 1960s Rome apartment reworked by 02A Studio (Marco Rulli and Thomas Grossi), a curved, lacquered red volume cuts through a hallway of raw, unfinished clay walls. The renovation inverts the apartment’s original day-night sequence, correcting a long central corridor and an awkward functional hierarchy left over from the building’s 1960s plan. What results is a home organized less by room type than by the rhythm of light moving through it.
The entrance opens onto a large iron-and-glass window that both illuminates and defines the adjacent study, setting the tone before the rest of the apartment unfolds. Nothing about the arrival sequence hints at what the corridor beyond it does with that light.
The corridor, softened into gentle curves, pulls the eye steadily toward the heart of the home instead of running as a straight raw clay plaster passage the way the original 1960s layout did. The move recalls a similar strategy in Rome apartment renovations like Casa Tirreno, where curved masonry is used to redirect circulation rather than simply connect rooms. Here the shift from hard edges to curved surfaces starts at this threshold and doesn’t let up.
The bedroom volume is the project’s most legible move: a curved lacquered red volume set directly against clay-textured walls left deliberately raw, unfinished, still in process. The contrast is the point — polished artifice against material that reads as unresolved, each sharpening the other rather than competing for attention. Nothing here pretends the building’s age away.
At the far end, a mirror stretches the apartment’s perceived depth while concealing the kitchen behind it, holding a calibrated balance between what the layout reveals and what it withholds. This concealed kitchen device does double duty as spatial trick and functional screen, folding the room out of the sequence without walling it off entirely.
The living room is built on contrast as a working method rather than a decorative flourish: Venetian terrazzo flooring sits beside herringbone oak parquet, glossy lacquer surfaces face off against the clay-textured walls, and steel detailing meets the same soft curvature that defines the corridor and bedroom. None of these pairings is smoothed over — the seams stay visible.
The dining area, framed by an archway opening, holds a large table set against an oxide-green sideboard, while the adjacent living area is arranged with a set of freestanding seating pieces as a space built purely for gathering rather than display. The two zones share the same open volume but read as distinct registers within it.
Furniture choices move between inherited family pieces and recognized design classics, building a vintage retro-futurist furniture vocabulary that threads older objects together with contemporary details rather than picking one lane. The result favors accumulation over curation — a home that reads as lived-in rather than styled for a single moment.
02A Studio‘s broader body of work in Rome — including a previous project that replaced internal masonry with functional furniture partitions — shows a consistent interest in unlocking rigid mid-century plans through material intervention rather than demolition. Casa Barro extends that logic into color and surface, applying it to a section of the apartment the original plan had treated as an afterthought.
The corridor problem the renovation set out to solve ends up justifying the apartment’s most dramatic gesture: a lacquered red volume built to fix a circulation issue reads more like a design statement than a functional necessity, and the two aren’t always the same thing.
Casa Barro by 02A Studio | Location: Rome, Italy — Year: 2026 — Key materials: clay plaster, lacquered curved volume, Venetian terrazzo, herringbone oak parquet, steel