caarpa Threads a Mint-Green Stair Between Two Reed-Roofed Glasshouses in a Private Genoa Garden

Genoa is a city built on the problem of level change. Its streets climb, its gardens are terraced, and its stone retaining walls hold back almost every piece of open ground. Scala San Filippo, completed in 2025 by the Genoese practice caarpa, starts from one of these small shifts in height inside a private garden near the city centre. Rather than flatten it or hide it, the architects use it as the reason for building at all.

The result is a pale green steel stair flanked by two glazed pavilions roofed in reed, set against an old stone wall with apartment blocks rising behind. On paper it reads as a garden structure, a greenhouse and a set of steps. In practice it works as a hinge between two levels of landscape, and it shows how far a modest steel-and-glass kit can go when it takes its cue from the ground rather than from a programme brief. We think that inversion is the most interesting thing about it.

A Stair as the Organising Idea

The name tells you where the priority sits: scala means stair. The steps sit at the centre of the composition and split the glazed volume into two pavilions, so the circulation becomes the axis of symmetry. Most garden buildings treat the stair as an afterthought tucked to one side. Here it is the main event, and the rooms read almost as its shoulders.

The mint green paint does a lot of work. It ties the stair to the glazing frames, softens the steel against the grey stone, and picks up the colour of the planting around it. Seen from the upper level, the stair points straight at the shuttered windows of the neighbouring blocks, a reminder that this garden is an urban pocket, not a rural retreat.

Glasshouses Leaning on Old Stone

Each pavilion works as a lean-to. The green steel frame and glass panels stand free on the lawn side, while the back of each room is the existing stone wall. That decision keeps the new construction light and lets the old masonry stay legible as the true structure of the site. Inside, you are always sitting against the history of the garden.

The reed roofs are the move that keeps this from feeling like a catalogue greenhouse. They filter the Ligurian sun, cut glare and heat gain through the glazed top, and give the pavilions a texture that belongs more to the garden than to the hardware store. Steel and glass give precision; reed brings the thing back toward the vernacular.

Thin Steel, Looped Rails

Up close, the detailing is lean. The treads are folded plate, the handrails are slim tubes that loop at their ends, and nothing is thicker than it needs to be. A shorter three-step flight elsewhere in the garden repeats the same vocabulary, which suggests caarpa thought of the stair as a system that can be extended across the plot rather than a one-off object.

The tubular rail winding through shrubs is a small pleasure. It reads almost like a garden hose or a vine support, a piece of infrastructure that the planting is allowed to grow around. Credit here also goes to landscape architect Pietro Bartolomeo d'Albertis, whose planting lets the steel recede instead of dominate.

Rooms Between House and Garden

The interiors resist a single label. A folding lounge chair, a hanging lamp, a swing seat, potted plants and sheer linen curtains suggest a sitting room as much as a greenhouse. A vaulted stone niche in the back wall becomes a found piece of architecture that the new glass simply frames.

The curtains matter more than they seem. Drawn along the glazing, they turn a fully transparent box into a room with privacy and softer light, which is necessary when apartment windows overlook the garden. It is a cheap, reversible layer that changes the building's character completely.

The Working Side of the Garden

Beneath and beside the stair, the floors turn to concrete and the furniture gives way to a watering can, a ladder and a snake plant. This is the potting shed half of the project, and it is handled with the same frame and glass as the lounge. We like that caarpa did not make a hierarchy between leisure space and work space; both get the same light and the same view of the ivy-draped wall.

A Table, a Ladder, the Light

Folding bistro chairs, an orange stool and a leaning ladder make up most of the furnishing, and that informality suits the architecture. The glazed roof and the open garden side turn the space into a sundial: raking afternoon light moves across the stone, and by dusk the steel columns read as a simple colonnade facing the lawn.

The open side is worth noting. Parts of the pavilions are not sealed at all, so the boundary between inside and outside is set by the roof and the floor rather than by a wall. In Genoa's mild climate, that is a reasonable bet, and it keeps the structure feeling like part of the garden.

Hens on the Steps

The garden's hens show up throughout the images, perched on treads, pecking across the concrete and nesting in a planter inside the stone niche. Architectural photography usually scrubs this kind of life out. Here it reads as evidence that the structure serves as shelter, perch and coop as readily as it serves people.

That multi-species use is part of why the Mixed Use tag fits better than it might first appear. The stair is circulation for the owners and furniture for the birds, and the lean-to is a lounge, a potting room and a henhouse at once.

Lanterns at Dusk

After dark the pavilions turn into lanterns. With the curtains drawn and lights on inside, the two glass volumes glow against the black mass of the hillside and the stone wall, while the stair stays a pale band between them. This is when the symmetry is clearest, and when the project's scale, small against the apartment blocks behind, feels most deliberate.

Plans and Drawings

The site plan clarifies the strategy. The garden is long and narrow, and the pavilion pair crosses it at mid-length, right where the level shifts. Rather than a building parked at one end, the structure acts as a threshold that divides the plot into two rooms of landscape, with paths and tree canopies arranged on either side. Seen from across the lawn, that crossing reads as a garden folly sitting on a terrace line.

Why This Project Matters

Scala San Filippo is small, and that is the point. It shows that a level change, usually treated as a nuisance to resolve with a retaining wall and a few steps, can generate an entire spatial idea. caarpa lets the stair lead and hangs everything else from it, producing a structure that organises the garden, frames the old stone and gives shelter to people, plants and animals alike.

It also offers a useful lesson in material restraint. Off-the-shelf logic of steel and glass, softened by reed roofs, linen curtains and a single well-chosen colour, produces something specific to its place without straining for it. For architects working on private gardens and urban leftovers, that balance between kit and context is worth studying closely.

Scala San Filippo by caarpa. Location: Genova, Italy. Area: 440 m². Year: 2025. Photography: Anna Positano.

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