A large Roman apartment updated for the 21st century

Maurizio Cascella loved his rental apartment in Rome so much that he stayed there for almost 20 years. When he and his partner, Lorena Muñoz, had his first child, Olivia, now 3, he approached the owner about buying the place.

To their dismay, they failed to reach an agreement. “I started looking for a new home hoping to find something similar, radiating Umbertino flair,” Cascella, 46, wrote in an email, referring to the 19th-century Italian architectural style known for its expressive grandeur.

After a long search, he found “a compromise that satisfied me,” he said: a 19th-century apartment near Roma Termini train station that had a lot of character, with ornate plaster moldings and parquet floors.

“What struck me about the new place was the great resemblance to the old house,” he said.

Commitment? He wasn’t ready to move.

When he saw it, the 1,380-square-foot space was being used as an office for a law firm. It had a single bathroom and was divided into five smallish rooms along a dark corridor. Fortunately, Mr. Cascella, an electronic music DJ, had met an architect through the music festival circuit who could help him transform it. So, after buying the apartment in June 2020 for 480,000 euros (about $515,000), he commissioned Emanuela Petrucci with turning it into a fun and hard-working home for a young family, without losing the elements that originally attracted it.

Ms. Petrucci appreciated those 19th century details and intended to preserve them, but she also saw an opportunity to inject new life into the apartment. “We fell in love with the typical Umbertino elements, but the layout of the space needed work,” she said.

To reconfigure the floor plan, he kept the first two rooms, for the master bedroom and a children’s bedroom, but demolished the walls between the other three to create one large space for the living room, dining room, and kitchen.

That arrangement didn’t require such a long hallway, so she was able to use the extra space in the hallway to build two bathrooms, one near the bedrooms and the other accessible from the living room.

Then the old bathroom could be removed to make room for a small guest room, to be used primarily by Mr. Cascella’s mother. “Because we are Italian, our mothers always come to our houses and we always need a place for them to stay,” Petrucci said with a smile.

The original parquet floors and plaster ceilings were kept intact, revealing how the living room and dining room were divided, and custom cabinetry built by Daniele Morelli was installed to maximize functionality.

The walls of the living room and dining room were covered with light blue custom-built shelves to house Mr. Cascella’s record collection and stereo, and an integrated bi-fold door was added to conceal the entrance to the guest room.

Between the dining room and the kitchen, Ms. Petrucci installed a glass wall that drops directly onto the island. Fitted with a retractable panel over the island and delicate doors on both sides, it allows the kitchen to remain open most of the time, although it can be closed to contain cooking odours.

In the master and children’s bedrooms, Ms. Petrucci added walk-in closets separated from the sleeping spaces by arched doorways inspired by the arches of Roma Termini station. And just inside the front door of the apartment, an inverted arch serves as a shovel for a bench.

“It’s a place to kick off your shoes, but it also feels a bit like a club,” he said.

Rather than toss out the Brazilian blue marble that lined the old bathroom, Petrucci saved it to build a coffee table for the living room and wall-mounted nightstands for the master bedroom.

To complete the home, she helped Mr. Cascella select furniture and artwork, including a concrete dining table from form and cement; luminaries of small shop; and pink ceramic figures by Emiliano Maggi and paintings by Marco Emmanuele, by Contemporary Operative Art.

“He really is an art lover,” Petrucci said of Cascella. “So we decided to put these huge paintings and little sculptures around the living room.”

Due to covid-related delays, the renovation took more than two years to complete, at a cost of about 170,000 euros (or $182,000). Mr. Cascella and Ms. Muñoz moved into the apartment in October 2022, after welcoming their second daughter, Clarissa, while construction was underway.

“It was a long and complicated carpentry job,” Cascella said, but the wait was worth it. “My daughters seem delighted every time they come in and experience it.”

For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here.