Location: Oliosi, Italy

Design Team: Bricolo Falsarella

Area: 2400 m²

Year: 2024

Photography: Pietro Savorelli, Filippo Bricolo

Design Features: Corte Renèe Resort stands in Oliosi, in the glacial hills of Lake Garda within the province of Verona. Bricolo Falsarella converted two nineteenth-century stone farm buildings into a 2400 m² retreat. Rather than turning the old fabric into a nostalgic backdrop, the architects began with its constructional logic, establishing a new spatial order across what was retained, repaired and added.

The design process was distilled into 32 construction rules addressing walls, openings, thresholds, stairs, furniture and material junctions. These rules do not impose visual uniformity. They allow elements from different periods to remain legible: irregular historic masonry retains its differences, while each intervention responds clearly to the existing scale. Building traces, craft variation and unfinished-looking surfaces are kept visible, so the sense of time comes from construction itself rather than applied decoration.

The most recognisable addition is a tower facing the pool court. Local stones are set into concrete mixed with earth and sand from the area; after the formwork is removed, the surface is washed to expose aggregate, stone and cement together. Its warm, coarse texture meets the old masonry without copying it. Narrow slits, deep openings and horizontal joints temper the tower's mass and register the slow movement of light across its thick walls.

The guest spaces extend this restraint. Timber cupboards, beds and tables are fitted among the old roof structure and stone walls, while black metal details define edges and junctions. Basins, window seats and stairs retain the directness of prototypes. Moving through the resort, one repeatedly encounters old and new at doorways, corners and floor edges, where granular stone, warm timber, washed concrete and darkened beams form the interior without resorting to a themed decorative layer.

Corte Renèe treats restoration as an ongoing process rather than a fixed image. The farm buildings do not return to an idealised past, and the new tower avoids formal spectacle. Instead, practical rules allow local matter, construction traces and daily use to keep shaping the architecture. Between pool, courts and rooms, visitors can read how a building has been made again through time.

Design Team: Bricolo Falsarella was founded and is directed by Francesca Falsarella and Filippo Bricolo. Active since 2003, the practice is based in Veneto among the morainic hills of Lake Garda. Its work begins with relationships among place, material and memory, spanning wineries and wine architecture, high-end residences, museum exhibitions, and projects in historically or environmentally sensitive settings.

The studio develops architecture through construction rules and precise details rather than forms conceived apart from their sites. Its work has received the Rigenera Award and Carlottaxarchitettura Award in 2025, the Gold Medal for Wine Architecture in 2024, and an IN/ARCH Triveneto Award in 2023, and has appeared in Casabella, Abitare and AMC. Filippo Bricolo is also Associate Professor of Museography at Politecnico di Milano. He served as lead architect for Corte Renèe, with Francesca Falsarella on the design team.