Stories
Every story in muroso
All stories in one place: architecture, interiors and outdoor, the newest first within each section.
24 stories across 3 sections
01
Architecture
Houses that know where they stand. Structure, siting, light and the slow decisions that decide whether a building ages well or merely gets older.
The Quiet Monolith
Concrete spent forty years shouting. The houses that matter now use it the way a good tailor uses canvas: structural, invisible, decisive.
How a House Meets Its Cliff
Every dramatic site offers the same three options: sit on it, cut into it, or step down it. The choice is made in the first week and paid for over fifty years.
The Return of the Courtyard
The oldest plan in domestic architecture is back, and not for romantic reasons. A courtyard is the cheapest climate device a house can own.
Glass, Reconsidered
The picture window won. Now comes the reckoning: what a wall of glass costs in comfort, energy and privacy, and where it earns its place.
Roofs That Do Something
The fifth facade is where contemporary houses give up. It should be doing four jobs at once: shedding water, making shade, holding plant and carrying weight.
The Twelve Metre Rule
Daylight reaches about two and a half times the head height of a window into a room. Every dark house you have ever stood in ignored that number.
Building With the Wind
Wind decides where you sit, where you eat and where the pool is usable. Almost nobody surveys it, and every unused terrace is the result.
02
Interiors
Rooms are not arrangements of furniture. They are proportion, surface, light and a small number of decisions made in the right order.
Poltrona Frau In Motion at 40: Futurism, Armchairs and the Culture of Movement
The Poltrona Frau Museum in Tolentino marks forty years of interiors for cars, trains, boats and aircraft with a Futurist painter and a limited armchair of 40 pieces.
Vitra Bascule: A Lounge Chair Tailored Like a Jacket
Studio Πand Vitra cut a loose fabric cover over a hidden tilt mechanism. The result reclines almost flat and does without glued parts and conventional foam.
Knoll Chermayeff Storage: Florence Knoll's Credenzas, Taken for a Walk
The Berlin architect Sam Chermayeff gives Florence Knoll's 1961 credenzas new scales, new uses and three new lacquers. Knoll calls the result adaptive reuse.
The Anatomy of a Calm Room
Calm is not a colour or a budget. It is eleven decisions taken in the right order, and most people take them in reverse.
Plaster, Lime and the End of Flat White
The most consequential decision in a room is the finish of its largest surface, and for thirty years everybody has been making it by default.
Seating Without a Sofa
The three-seater facing a television is the least social arrangement ever devised. Here is what replaces it.
Kitchens That Stopped Shouting
The island grew, the handles vanished, the appliances multiplied. The best new kitchens are quietly going the other way.
The Bedroom as a Dark Room
A bedroom has one job it cannot delegate. Everything else, the art, the bench, the reading chair, is negotiable.
Bathing, Slowly
The bathroom has been over-engineered into a showroom. What actually improves it is warmth underfoot, daylight and one honest material.
Colour Above Eye Level
Most people paint the wall they look at and leave the ceiling white. Reverse it, and rooms you thought were finished start behaving differently.
Living With Stone Indoors
Stone inside a house is either the most permanent surface you will ever own or an expensive lesson in absorption rates. The difference is one number.
03
Outdoor
The best room in a warm-climate house has no ceiling. Terraces, shade, water, fire and gardens that survive August without a hose.
The Outdoor Room, Properly Built
A terrace is not a paved area. It is a room that happens to have no ceiling, and it fails for the same reasons rooms do.
Pools That Look Like Water, Not Tile
The colour of a pool is decided by four things, and the tile you spend three weeks choosing is only one of them.
Fire, Placed Correctly
An outdoor fire extends the usable year by two months. Put it in the wrong place and it extends it by nothing at all.
The Mediterranean Garden Without a Lawn
The lawn is a northern European habit exported to places that cannot support it. What replaces it is more interesting and needs a tenth of the water.
Shade Is a Material
In a hot climate, shade is not a comfort feature. It is the structure that decides which parts of your plot exist between May and September.
Outdoor Kitchens Beyond the Grill
Most outdoor kitchens are a barbecue with cupboards. The ones that get used every day are planned like kitchens and drained like bathrooms.