Alongside the restoration of historic villas, on hillsides covered in vineyards, and thanks to the development stimulated by the renewed popularity of wine-making and rural tourism, several large agricultural estates in the Tuscan countryside have commissioned projects for new constructions, needed to relaunch their wine-making activities.
Significant results have been achieved by the Bernardo Tori Practice in the renovation of villas and country houses, as well as in the construction of new wine cellars: both types of project successfully blend the functional requirements of the architecture into the context of the landscape.
Devoting great attention to this aspect — increasingly a priority need in modern architecture — has enabled us to design “timeless” buildings, in which the references to tradition blend beautifully with the use of state-of-the-art technologies, to meet the production needs of the winery as well as satisfying the needs for comfort and projecting the estate's image.
Today we use the highly evocative, almost romantic term “cellar” to describe what is in actual fact a highly modern production plant. We thus need to design a place where ergonomics and production requirements are the priority, and where modern technology — complementing the work in the vineyards — needs its dedicated spaces and proudly plays its role.