Light industry

Amazing glazing and chic shades of grey at Celine’s new Tuscan manufactory

- LAURA RYSMAN

Nestled amid the lush and gently undulating hills at the heart of Tuscany, the bucolic small town of Radda in Chianti encompasses dozens of vineyards and centuries-old farmhouses. Last August, this agricultural bastion became the home of a contemporary and cosmopolitan new neighbour from Paris, when Celine inaugurated a sprawling handbag-making plant there. Designed by Fabio Barluzzi and Barbara Ponticelli of the MetroOffice architecture studio, ‘La Manufacture’, as it is named by Celine, is a glass and concrete hilltop monolith that doesn’t apologise for its industrial muscle. Instead, its transparent walls are designed to eliminate the boundary between the viticultural hills and the workers inside, exalting the role of the artisans by encircling them with Tuscany’s natural beauty.

‘We never intended to hide the fact that this is a factory,’ said Barluzzi, pausing before one of the building’s full glass walls, which faces out towards the hilly crests neatly combed by snaking rows of grapevines. ‘We just wanted to help the factory to exist within this countryside context.’ The architects devised full walls of glass to open the panorama in every direction for the factory’s workers, swearing off view-blocking window blinds and curtains to mediate the sun. The upper half of the glass walls are instead sheathed in semi-transparent, light-diffusing glass bricks, creating a second skin that wraps around all but the northern façade and echoes the bowed form of the hill on which the building sits, formerly the site of a kitchen furniture factory. ‘Factories generally make the landscape uglier,’ comments Ponticelli. ‘This one follows the shape of the landscape instead.’