In a ground-floor Florence apartment where exploratory tests during a renovation surfaced a centuries-old fresco, DEFERRARI+MODESTI chose not to restore it in full or frame it behind glass. The Florence-based architecture and interior design studio, founded in 2010 by Javier Deferrari and Lavinia Modesti, left a single recovered fragment exposed on a wall in the children’s bedroom of Casa GZ, a 100-square-meter apartment in the historic Santa Croce district. The result treats the building’s own memory as something to live alongside, not something to rope off.
A wall shared with history runs through the apartment, marking its most unusual constraint. The building stands beside the former monastery of San Francesco de’ Macci, founded by the Poor Clares in 1349, and the apartment now overlooks the Borgo Allegri garden — once the monastery’s own vegetable garden. A long internal wall, shared with the historic complex, is punctuated by original load-bearing pietra serena columns (a soft grey sandstone quarried near Florence) that extend throughout the apartment, tying the home structurally to what stood there centuries before it.
Rediscovered frescoes followed almost as a consequence of that wall. The presence of the pietra serena columns suggested the apartment might hold further traces of its past, so the studio brought in a conservator to run exploratory tests, uncovering fresco fragments from different periods. One was restored and left visible in the children’s bedroom. “The project began with an exploration of a highly layered home, where the pietra serena columns, the rediscovered frescoes and the relationship with the former monastery could not be treated simply as decorative features. We sought to allow them to emerge naturally, creating a balance between historical memory and contemporary everyday life,” Lavinia Modesti says.
Living spaces reaching the garden defined the new layout more than any single material choice. The living room, dining room and kitchen were reorganized to open directly toward the exterior, while the parents’ suite was pulled in the opposite direction — a more secluded volume with its own private bathroom and walk-in wardrobe. “With Casa GZ, we undertook a profound reorganisation of the spaces, with the aim of restoring the quality of a property that had lost some of its original residential character. The project brought light, continuity and new relationships back into the interiors, transforming the apartment into a contemporary and welcoming home capable of engaging with the history of its setting,”Javier Deferrari says.
An internal garden as a room completes that reorganization rather than sitting outside it. Furnished with seating and plants, and offering direct glimpses of the bell tower of Santa Croce, the garden was conceived as a sheltered space for quiet moments and outdoor living. A burgundy pergola with a reed canopy marks the transition between inside and out, functioning less like a boundary than a doorway.
Color enters through the kitchen, where the palette becomes noticeably more intense. The apartment’s owner, who works in the fashion industry, was closely involved in shaping this part of the project, contributing to a sophisticated and deliberately layered palette. Chevron parquet flooring is paired with rugs designed by Fortunato Depero and Gio Ponti in the living area and principal bedroom — a pairing that puts Casa GZ in the same conversation as other Italian residential projects currently treating color as structure rather than finish, among them Rome’s Casa Tahiti, where Margine divided an apartment’s rooms by hue instead of by wall.
Continuity underfoot holds the apartment’s eclectic furniture choices together. A Hungarian herringbone oak parquet, laid by Parchettificio Toscano, runs beneath a mix of chairs by Achille Castiglioni, vintage kitchen lighting, family furnishings and pieces found at flea markets — a combination that leans on floor continuity to unify what would otherwise be a fairly disparate set of objects and periods. It’s a strategy with company elsewhere in Tuscany: at The Lobster in nearby Prato, bucci quentin used a similar unbroken herringbone oak floor to carry a renovation through very different rooms without adding new walls.
A bathroom inspired by the cathedral is one of the project’s most specific gestures. The principal bathroom’s floor draws directly from the Florence Cathedral marble inlays, forming a marble “carpet” that guides the eye toward a sculptural lacquered-wood washbasin topped with red cement. The shower disappears behind an ochre curtain, while yellow travertine flooring adds weight to the room. Nearby, the principal bedroom is introduced by its own ochre-colored portal, set within a bespoke panelled wardrobe — a threshold marking the shift from shared spaces to private ones.
A fresco above the toys sits in the room where the two daughters now sleep — a plaster fragment far older than anything else in the room, exposed above a nightstand of toys and drawings pinned to the wall. Nobody has to explain to them what it is or ask them to be careful around it; it’s simply part of the room they wake up in every day, the same as the door or the window.
House GZ by DEFERRARI+MODESTI | Location: Santa Croce, Florence, Italy — Year: 2025 — Key materials: pietra serena, Hungarian herringbone oak parquet, Carrara marble, yellow travertine, Murano glass