We are an ex-Milanese couple with two very lively children, used to living outdoors as much as possible from an early age.

A few years ago we tried to go and live in Sweden, where we had often been in the summer, having a very helpful grandmother on site. We went away for a couple of weeks during the Christmas holidays. Beautiful, even if cold and dark continually loomed over the rhythms of us Italians accustomed to other latitudes.

Nothing came of it, but we returned to Milan with a lithograph representing an imaginative tree bought in a shop in the center of Stockholm, which we hung in the corridor in Milan. There he remained for a few years until we decided to fulfill our dream, that is to come and live in the mountains, more precisely in Viceno, reserving a part of our home to welcome friends and guests.

As the place for our dream we chose, and we were granted, not a secluded house surrounded by greenery but the very heart of the town. In fact, observing the town of Viceno from above, it seems that the Genius Loci - or the "spirit of the place" - of this small Alpine village has inserted the tip of the compass of history right here, in our small garden.

When it was time to choose the name of the bed&breakfast (now a holiday home) and have a logo designed, we reasoned for days and days exchanging laconic messages. In the end, we decided on Terrarara, a tribute to the many beautiful meanings of the word "land" in the Italian language: to the land that enchants life, to the soil that nourishes plants, to the planet that hosts us all; which is combined with the adjective rare, forming a single word, dedicated to a truly special place.

But the name Terrarara also wants to be a dedication to new technologies: "rare earths" are in fact called some chemical elements deriving from fundamental minerals for the alternative energy and electronics sector, two of the cornerstones of the life project that underlies the creation of Terrarara.

Because any bed&breakfast would have made no sense to us, we wanted it to be "green" as we believe that this is the future, in the now increasingly widespread belief that "the earth is not an inheritance received from our fathers, but a loan from give back to our children."

And because we wouldn't have even remotely considered the idea of moving from Milan if a simple internet connection, a computer and a cell phone didn't make us feel at the center of the world even in these remote and extraordinary places.

Speaking of the logo, by dint of passing it in the corridor of our house in Milan, we realized that it could only have the flavor of the lithograph bought in Stockholm a few winters earlier. 

In a corner, a signature, a name, a website: the Swedish artist Lotta Olsson declared herself available to work with us and, after a few months of daily contacts and trials and trials, we arrived at the final version: a green branch shaped to form a capital T, characterized by the presence of ends of different shapes and colors, among leaves, flowers and bulbs, with the word Terrarara in the foreground in a stick font. In reality, more than a logo, the most authentic expression of our love for nature.

The recent events that we all know have prompted us to transform the bed&breakfast into a holiday home, which we manage with unchanged passion.

The mansion

The exterior of the house responds to the dictates of the recovery intervention of the local building heritage called Il Vecchio Borgo, which includes about twenty residential units in the oldest inhabited nucleus of Viceno, dating back to before 1500. 

This intervention is characterized by the re-proposition of local architectural features - such as the absence of shutters, the small window frames punctuated by horizontal crossbars and the internal shutters - and traditional materials, in full respect of the surrounding landscape. 

A precious initiative, which has avoided the construction of new buildings and the distortion of the historic housing plot, allowing old and new to coexist in full harmony. 

Our home, in particular, proposes the combination of stone and wood, both coming from the demolition of old buildings on site.

The orientation of the building takes up the east/west direction of the ancient rustic, of particular interest from a bioclimatic point of view. 

In the interior design, in collaboration with the architect Piero Piana, we placed the living areas towards the east and south, to capture as much light as possible during the day, and the sleeping areas in the northern part of the house, to always keep them fresh and comfortable .

By deliberate contrast with the exterior, the interior is furnished in a Scandinavian style, characterized at the same time by warmth and minimal signs.

But the North is a subtle presence in all environments, with an insistence on the themes of nature - which recur punctually in every corner of the house: in the materials, such as the wood of the horizontal surfaces; in the numerous windows which, although small in size, frame and reproduce the wonderful external panoramas inside; in the decorations of the walls, cups and cushions – to the attention to detail, which belongs to us by culture as well as by training, being both above all architects.

We recently added a small building to the complex that can accommodate two other mini holiday homes, characterized by a cozy attic and a soft blue exterior.