New American Houses 2: Country, Sea & Cities (2001) Matteo Vercelloni (Italy: Edizioni L'Archivolto) "Invention and Rehabilitation"   Similar cases of face-to-face encounters with existing building fabric are exemplified by the work of Harry Elson in Florida, who adroitly rewrote the rules for holiday home design, replacing the existing Spanish style with a new tight geometric format that neatly exploited the existing floor plan. The project illustrated here takes a working approach based on reinvention and rehabilitation and applies it to an existing house built in the local eclectic Spanish style. Converted into a modern villa with surrounding gardens, the new house offers an astute revision of the vital rapport between interior and exterior. In terms of floor plan, the new scheme involved reorchestrating the rooms, amplifying the living space, enlarging the garage, which is covered with a burnished iron trellis of geometrical design entwined with various creeping plants, thereby providing a functional service area and creating a new room for studio use with large windows onto the garden with its swimming pool beyond. From the compositional viewpoint this fine example of contemporary restoration has completely effaced the previous stylistic vernacular of the building, lending it a new, taut, grammar of its own which plays off the solid entrance facades with their elementary symmetries providing privacy to the interior, against the new arrangement of glazed and full-height porch linking the house with the swimming pool, thereby radically altering the relationship between the back prospect and the garden outside. Ranged with slender paired columns painted gray that neatly blend with the warm yellow paintwork of the main body of the building, the porch proposes a habitable space of its own, a comfortable and pleasantly shaded interval between the bright living-room, the pool and the greenery. The new interior layout involved removing non-structural walls to gain added space, producing a single open area with only low partitions that variously cordon off the living room and dining room area, while underlying the central axis along which the stone courtyard outside is aligned, together with the entrance and pool, the whole concluded at the end by a small poolside changing-room that has replaced the former structure. Matching the rigorous geometrical definition of volumes is the exacting choice of materials and colors (pale gray stone for floors inside and out, white walls mounted with natural wood fittings), while a series of geometric skylights set into the ceiling allow a flood of natural light throughout the house, illuminating the varied collection of artworks and designer furniture, including a striking upside-down tree-lamp and a handful of collector's items.