Villa Baronessa

ON ARCHITECTURE (Walter Angonese and Schiefer Tschöll Architektur)

“Add or continue? A recurring question! We have decided to continue, to build at this villa which dates back to the fifties. It has been projected by Walter Pinzer for baroness Weihrauch di Pauli. As  southern conclusion to the formerly persisting extensive private park of the palais Weihrauch di Pauli we seized the existing building and conveyed it into the 21st century.

Towards the east, the villa exhibits an extension, which took over the villa’s distinct forms and themes. Attached to this extension a small building, which we always affectionately called „teahouse”, was built. This small pavilion-like building shall not deny any reference to its Japanese counterparts and yet includes forms of the landscape and the living culture it is surrounded by. At the main house the round balcony reinterprets the kitchen vault. A connecting patio guarantees the conceptual approach of continuing and not adding. The “teahouse”, as an independent small building with its hipped roof, reinterprets the typical monk and nun roof in a contemporary approach.

However, the protagonist of the whole remains the landscape: the views over the vineyards to lake Kaltern, the view of the Dolomites or of the Mendel mountains. While the pre-existing openings were preserved, the new ones focus on landscape views. But no view is the same. Every view has its own frame and, every view becomes a picture that frames the landscape for its residents.

Inside, typical local materials create a special atmosphere. Wood, terrazzo floors, plaster and a colour concept conceived by the artist Manfred Alois Mayr cause the house to vibrate in a unique way.

The lush garden, a place of sensations and tranquillity, was designed by the garden designer Roland Dellagiacoma. Further, there is a spacious garage for cars and a wine cellar – typical for Kaltern – shall not be missing as a distinctive place. A stately house was realized consisting of two wings in which the spirit of the baroness still seems to be present.”

ON ART INTERVENTION / COLOUR CONCEPT, PERGOLA AND CELLULA FOR THE VILLA BARONESSA (Marion Piffer Damiani)

In the Villa Baronessa the artist Manfred Alois Mayr puts the residents or  guests not ‘in front’, but ‘in the centre’ of the colour. In doing so the colour is not used as a design or a décor: it is configured  in a multi-layered relation with form and content of the building and of the latters surroundings as a social, historic and geographic experience area.

Chalk white, oxide red, ultramarine blue, grape black brownish, sulphur yellow, gold, silk-mat and high gloss – these are the colours and images used at the Villa Baronessa.

The artist Manfred Alois Mayr shapes facades, colours walls, gold-plates construction steel, undercuts colour clichés and composes objects out of industrial raw materials. So he did for the pergola and the cellula of the Villa Baronessa. His artistic interventions evolve mostly not for art and exhibition contexts but rather for competition and contract works in the field of architecture and public space.