ISSUE NO. 54

A September Issue

A ruin exists as matter carrying time—still here, still changing. It’s less an object than a process, where weather, plants, and memory keep working after use ends.

Encountering it invites a stance: aestheticize decay, conserve evidence, or compose renewal. Each stance sets a horizon for care—what’s sealed, named, repaired, and what is returned to use.

ARCHITECTURALLY CURIOUS

decay look → limewash, matte sealers, weathering steel, reclaimed wood

From the street, the home’s simplicity masks the ingenuity within. Timber shutters frame uneven stone openings, each adjusted by hand to meet walls that have shifted over two centuries. Instead of erasing those irregularities, the builders embraced them, embedding custom T-shaped pine frames directly into the stone. The result isn’t flawless—it’s alive, a facade that records the house’s age while keeping it in dialogue with the present.

Inner Quiet

Step inside and the palette turns to lime and marés sandstone, creating a soft, almost chalky stillness. Built-in benches run along the walls, carved directly from blocks of local stone, blurring the line between structure and furniture. Even rubble salvaged from the demolition was worked into new lintels and thresholds, ensuring nothing was wasted. The arched doorway, with its view of the old rock wall, keeps the interiors tethered to the island’s geology.

Textures of Renewal

In the bedroom and beyond, centuries-old techniques meet future-facing materials like hemp—durable, moisture-resistant, and perfect for the Mediterranean climate. Lime plaster coats not just the walls but also ceilings and floors, a rare move that adds surprising warmth to concrete-like finishes.

Even small details, like cantilevered lime-plastered steps, become experiments in blending tradition with reinvention. The house is threading history, ecology, and craft into one seamless form.

GLOBAL GLIMPSE

A Table for Exchanges

This space uses arches and alcoves to control how each room is experienced. Instead of wide, open views, the architecture narrows sightlines and then releases them, creating moments of intimacy. The dining nook, with its fabric-draped table and built-in seating, is a study in how minimal interventions can shift a room’s character.

Tiles as Memory Holders

In the kitchen, green tile is offset by black trim, a detail that grounds the space while highlighting its original geometry. The cabinetry is kept matte and solid, giving weight to the perimeter so that the tiled surfaces stand out. Even the shelving and dish-ware feel somewhat integrated, reinforcing the idea of the kitchen as both functional and composed.

Between Two Doors

The upper floor introduces symmetry through carved wooden doors, paired like a set piece. Between them, a low platform and centered artwork make the hallway feel intentional rather than transitional. It’s an example of how restraint—simple placement, clear sightlines, and a single focal point—can elevate an ordinary passage into part of the design narrative.

VISUAL COMFORT

re Examine Imperfection

There’s something about stone when it carries the weight of both permanence and imperfection. This piece, cut from Travertino Ascolano, leans into the natural voids and irregularities of the material—marks that feel less like flaws and more like signatures of time. The scalloped edge softens its mass, while the stepped base recalls ancient monuments stripped down to their essentials. What emerges is an object that is at once sculptural and functional, a table but also a meditation on endurance.

The collection it belongs to thrives on this duality—where design does not erase the rawness of matter, but frames it. Travertine becomes less about polish and more about dialogue: between natural complexity and human intervention, between ancient technique and contemporary reinterpretation. The choice to embrace irregularity, rather than mask it, places this work in conversation with traditions of wabi-sabi and Buddhist thought on impermanence. It invites us to look closer, to find beauty in what resists control, and to reconsider how value is inscribed into form.

MUSICAL INTERLUDE

What I'm Listening to in September

Aestheticizing preserves texture yet risks decorating harm; conserving holds testimony yet risks freezing the story; renewal restores function yet risks erasing memory. To meet a ruin is to meet public time, and to choose the kind of future it will be allowed to enter—I’ll see you next week, my friend.

Warmly,
/shane