The story
From the Houses of
Parliament to a
mountain hostel
We met at the Houses of Parliament in London in 2014. Julia was working as a Senior Cost Manager on major infrastructure projects. Antonio was the founding director of Marcel Mauer Architecture. We were both doing work we were proud of, in a city we had each chosen for the opportunities it offered — and we were both, without quite admitting it to ourselves, looking for something else.
In 2020 we moved to Italy. Not to retire, not to slow down — but to build something different. We spent six months looking at properties before we found a derelict mountain hostel in Ventasso, at 1060 metres above sea level, surrounded by the National Park of the Appennino Tosco-Emiliano and 50 metres from a thermal spa and an adventure park we had never heard of.
The building was in near-derelict condition — energy class G, damp walls, single glazing, gas heating. Antonio designed the retrofit. Julia managed it as a construction project. Together we improved it from energy class G to B: cork insulation, triple glazing, 11kW of photovoltaic panels. The Restructura Award 2024 — given by the Italian construction industry for the best retrofit project in the country — validated what we had built.
The FabLab came from a conversation with the Politecnico di Milano. The residency programme came from the first artist who asked if she could stay for a month. The cultural programme came from the community around us — the neighbour with the astronomical observatory, the thermal spa owner who is also our GP, a very popular adventure park next door.
Girotondo Horizons is what happens when two people with serious professional skills decide to apply them to something they actually believe in. We are still building it.
