A luminous re-write of a Sicilian landmark

Studio Didea turns a 16th-century church in Alcamo into a daylight-driven workplace.

The façade still carries the calm heft of tuff stone, but step inside and the old nave is now awash with sky. Palermo-based Studio Didea has taken what was once a de consecrated church—stripped of its fittings, capped with a concrete frame in the 1970s—and cut it open to daylight, rebuilding the interior as a two-level office for a local company. Their brief was pragmatic (desks, meeting rooms, a courtyard for coffee breaks); their solution is almost cinematic, replacing lost ornament with rhythm, texture, and a shaft of Mediterranean sun that drops straight through a new skylight.

Working by subtraction

With little historic fabric left beyond the outer walls, the architects began by removing—lifting one ceiling to carve a double-height volume, then trimming partitions until the space read as a single, airy chamber. The concrete skeleton, already in place, now supports an oak-clad pillar that quietly organizes circulation while leaving the ancient masonry in full view. “Light is the most precious element in all our work,” notes Didea co-founder Nicola Andò; here it becomes the main finish, washing across rough stone and pale timber in equal measure.

Four quadrants, endless layouts

Instead of new walls, Didea uses glass screens and custom oak cabinetry to demarcate four zones: open desks for laptop nomads, quieter focus rooms, a long table for board meetings, and—tucked beside the skylight—a pocket patio that doubles as a thinking perch. The plan is intentionally loose, “blank pages of a refined notebook,” in the studio’s words, ready to be rewritten as teams grow or shrink. Finishes follow the same logic: concrete floors, wood-fiber ceiling panels for acoustic control, and slim aluminum frames that slip almost unnoticed between stone and sky.

Minimalism with a Mediterranean accent

The palette is warm but restrained: honey oak, muted limestone, the soft green of indoor palms. No decorative flourishes, just thin vertical slats that catch sidelight like the pages of an open book. Didea cites photographer Luigi Ghirri and artist James Turrell as touchstones, and you feel both influences here—the former in the way daylight pools against white plaster, the latter in the glowing plane of the skylight overhead. Sustainability, too, is handled quietly: preserving the shell, minimizing demolition, specifying wood-fiber insulation and high-efficiency glazing rather than headline-grabbing tech.

A workplace that remembers its past

What could have become yet another generic office is instead a measured conversation between eras: 16th-century stone, 20th-century concrete, 21st-century light. The result is less a makeover than a gentle un-packing, letting the old volumes breathe while giving today’s users a space that will flex with new patterns of work. In Didea’s hands, Prior Ecclesia becomes a quiet study in Italian architecture, where sixteenth-century stone meets twenty-first-century light.