torre di moravola - revisited

Last February I blogged about the beautiful boutique hotel Torre di Moravola, a thousand-year-old Umbrian hilltop watchtower converted into a seven-room boutique hotel. The owners, Christopher Chong, an architect and former Norman Foster associate, and his wife, Seonaid Mackenzie, a designer have done more than a renovation. Within the outer shell of the tower they’ve constructed an entirely new inner structure, with seven strikingly modern suites arranged around a central stair. Some day I hope to stay here.

Tablet Hotels, the booking agency, recently interviewed Christopher Chong in their on-line magazine Tablet 10. Following is an excerpt.

Christopher, how much of the architecture work you did here is conceptual, and how much is intuitive or reacting to the site?
Well, we saw the site, we did a survey, and you have some sort of idea, but it’s only when you put the pieces all together that you can see what the existing plan was like. We put it in front of us, we put a piece of tracing paper over it, and in five minutes we came up with the concept. Probably just because we were thinking about it all the time, before we got back to Britain.

That was the initial concept, and then you refine it all the time as you get more information, because it’s hard to clamber about in an old building, because it’s dangerous, and half the floors are inaccessible. And then as you work through the process it’s more and more detailed, and you put layer upon layer, and you end up with the result that you’re looking for.

There must have been some challenges issuing from the intended use as a hotel.
We had to build a lot of it ourselves, due to budget constraints, and it’s one thing being an architect and designing this stuff — if you’ve got a huge budget, it’s easy. But in our case it was trying to be clever with what we had available, with whatever tools we had, and making the best of that. And when you’re actually building it, the details that you draw — we had over 1,500 drawings that we made over six years — some of the time you actually sit on the site and you say, “how do you build this?” Even at that stage, when you thought you’d thought through everything, you have to make changes. So it’s a good thing that we were on site all the time.

You also had to come up with an interesting solution for climate control.
We created these atria, two light wells, which when you stand in them you can actually see the full height of the tower, which you wouldn’t normally be able to see, as you pass through the building. It’s quite hard to imagine. But either side of this tower we have these skylights which allow you to view the actual tower itself. And they allow light right into the heart of the building, but they also allow the hot air in the summers to cool, through the stack effect, the actual building itself. Because hot air rises, and it draws the cool air through the building.

In Italy in summer you could easily have a huge air conditioning system humming away all the time.
We just thought it was terrible, environmentally. We’ve got these incredibly thick walls, which are great at preventing heat conduct. Because the walls heat up in the sunshine, and just release the back out. But inside, because the walls are so think, they’re pretty cool, they don’t get that hot. Over half a meter thick.

As an architect it’s probably quite a satisfying feeling, having the design and construction finished, and letting the place just operate.
That’s true. I’ve been exploring creative input in other ways, like cooking, and doing things like that, when the guests are here. But fortunately for me, I have other projects in the pipeline, so that in the winter months, we’ve been really busy doing other projects.


I imagine trading in the life of an urban firm architect for the life of a self-employed one in the Italian countryside is kind of a dream.
It’s very creative, and it doesn’t have those constraints of nine-to-five and commuting — which, I couldn’t do that in Hong Kong again.