In a peri-central district of Pordenone—an area left on the margins of recent regeneration processes—a linear semi-detached house appeared as a closed body: narrow access, introverted façade, and layers of tertiary additions accumulated over time. The project takes this ordinary fragment of the city as an opportunity to restore measure and dignity to public space, showing how even at the scale of a single home it is possible to spark a virtuous urban transformation.

The starting condition was typical of many dense Italian suburbs: an “unfortunate” street, crossed but not inhabited, with a domestic frontage defended by gates and setbacks that denied any relationship with the road. The project makes an ethical stance from the outset: no new land consumption, no erasure of memory or material, but care for the existing so that it may once again speak to the city. The whole measure of the intervention lies in turning an edge into a threshold—a device capable of connecting, protecting, and making a place legible.

Three gestures sustain the project:

Subtraction. The office additions that had rigidified the plot and blocked visual and functional permeability were removed, restoring continuity to the street frontage.

Precision of the open space. The small front garden, once unused, has been redefined as a courtyard: intimate and protected, yet visible from the street. It is not an enclosure, but a slow threshold—a place for short pauses, a pocket of air between city and home.

Measured addition. A cantilevered extension defines the new threshold. The overhang shelters and invites: it becomes a porch for the entrance, offers protection to those arriving, and projects the house toward the urban space without exposing its privacy. It is an act of generosity toward the street, not an intrusion upon the plot.

The threshold is both a climatic and civic infrastructure. It regulates solar gain, creates summer shade and winter warmth, and enables cross-ventilation through the ordered composition of openings. Above all, it builds a relationship of trust with the neighborhood: the presence of a porch and an inhabited façade stitches together the street sequence, brings light and informal surveillance, and makes the narrow passage safer. The house does not defend itself from the city—it interprets it.

Within this new grammar of the edge, the project coherently explores the dialectic between intimacy and sharing. The courtyard is the first domestic space and the last urban one—a threshold that allows sight and sound to pass while holding back noise and intrusion. The play between public and private is not a formal trick but a necessary condition for the home to belong to a community without losing its own measure.

The dwelling embraces two complementary passions and builds an order around them.

The music room, inspired by the 19th-century studio of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, is designed for listening and rehearsal. The openings are not showcases—they are conversations between the domestic locus amoenus and the urban genius loci. When the harp plays, the courtyard captures its breath, returning to the street a subtle sign of life.

The model-making room, double-height, entrusts wood with the declaration of making: light and shadow carve out operative niches, verticality sets the rhythm of time and concentration.

Between the two, the green room is a deliberate void—an interval of natural light and vegetation that suspends functions and connects them. Here, the project refrains from assigning a single use, leaving everyday life the freedom to interpret.

Sustainability is not proclaimed; it is practiced. The reuse of the built fabric, the volumetric compactness, the removal of superfetations, the use of eco-compatible materials such as wood and permeable pavements, and the careful calibration of openings all produce comfort through low-tech strategies and without further land consumption. The threshold-porch is a simple yet effective device: it limits thermal peaks, shields the entrance from rain, and encourages outdoor use across seasons. Attention to the durability of materials and to ordinary maintenance makes the project consistent with an idea of resource economy that is, above all, a form of civic culture.

Modest in scale, the intervention is ambitious in outcome. It regenerates a stretch of street—making it more legible, safer, brighter. It stitches back a complex urban fabric—the house becomes a façade again, not a backside. It restores a place of proximity—the porch as an invitation to linger, the courtyard as a micro-landscape that teaches care. It activates a replicable model—showing how to intervene on the thousands of semi-detached houses and small plots that populate Italian cities, demonstrating that urban quality depends not on the scale of investment but on the precision of design.

An ethical approach to the profession, capable of transforming a marginal condition into a public opportunity. Ethics resides in choices: listening to context, rejecting waste, defining shareable spaces, restoring dignity to the street. The transformation is not spectacular; it is virtuous because it is stable, legible, useful. It is a quiet revolution of manners—showing that living better also means making what lies beyond the doorstep live better too.