I saw the villa for the first time during the history of Architecture class at the school of Architecture, as a schematic floor plan by Palladio to be studied among dozens of others.

Many years later I saw it in person visiting relatives who live near Maser, in the foothills of the Venetian Alps.

(You can visit my cousin too atCycling-Made in Italy)

It did not hit me until I was looking for ideas to design my own house after we bought a 2 acres lot North of Greensboro in which a barrier of trees and boulders along the road shielded a meadow sloping gently South to a picturesque pond.

The villa Barbaro! The way it sits, serenely facing South at the top of a long sloping meadow with its back to a small knoll covered with thick vegetation. Except for the scale I could see using a similar layout for my house.

Palladio, like most master builders of the time, knew by necessity how to take advantage of all opportunities that a site offered to make the building more livable. Remember that in those times there was no central heating or cooling, no plumbing systems, the brightest lights were candles.

Palladio planned this summer villa on two levels. The lower level is really a South facing daylight basement to be used  the year around by the servants. It provides underground shelter and solar comfort in winter. The main (noble) floor has large windows in the shaded upper part of the colonnade that offer magnificent long views to the South. On the North side it opens on grade to an intimate garden. A spring comes out of the mountain there, pauses in a pool before flowing through the primitive plumbing of the house and down the meadow in a series of fountains. Every bedroom is like a breezeway for maximum summer comfort.

Those were all features that I could imagine for our house on the new site, except of course, that we would have to build in a much smaller scale, with modern technology and conveniences (no servants).

The program for our house was an unusual agglomeration of functions but everything fell in place readily:

• The central body, that following the Palladian model juts out toward the South, would be our residence proper. We gave it a daylight basement because of the slope of the land and an upper floor because we wanted the master bedroom to have the view and privacy of the roof terrace.
• The two narrow East and West wings would house our two offices. In the Palladian model these wings are protected on the South side by a two story colonnade. In my house this was reduced to a deep overhanging eave.
• The wing return to the East that houses the stables in the prototype, could be the garage.
• The wing return to the West would be the guest suite as it was in the original.
• The space enclosed by the wings forms intimate gardens enclosed on the street side by low walls enclosing a small pool.

The main variance from Palladio’s scheme was in the location of the main entrance. In the original it is on the South side. We had to come in from the North side. I worked out the entrance walk so that it is a procession of spaces, one of which is the entry courtyard with the fountain.

The style of the detailing was critical. I had followed Palladio’s inspiration for the program and general layout, but I knew that it would be a serious mistake to imitate the style, simply because of the enormous difference in scale.

It had to be simple.

In the end I settled on flush stucco walls, with flush windows and doors with minimal trim. Simplicity accentuates the sculptural quality of the volumes. In this spirit all inside corners between walls and soffits are connected with round coves to reduce the number of shadow lines.

We landscaped with low maintenance wild flowers and fruit trees, maintaining the axiality of the house, in the Italian renaissance tradition. As a result the house has a presence that belies its relatively small size and is a joy to live in.