Designing in the building fabric of a historic city like Venice, especially in the case of so-called ‘minor’ housing, means dealing with a fairly unbalanced layout of spaces, with reduced sizes of the rooms and the inevitable need to relate to the context. The restoration of the apartment on the top floor of a sixteenth-century building in the Santa Croce district complied with the client’s precise wish to create a diaphanous, dematerialised space with clean, simple lines; a break from the exuberant and always exposed richness of Venice. White predominates inside in all its possible forms, from the gloss of the resin floor to the opaque of the walls and beams, the semi-gloss of the furnishings and the milky tone of the Plexiglas. The natural light that comes in from the windows, incorporated into the bookcase-wall of the large living-dining room-kitchen, blurs the internal edges and highlights the view of the roofs of Venice, the only note of colour ‘framed’ on the walls like a series of household pictures. The zenith light from the skylight above the staircase softens the angularity of the steel, while theatrically emphasising its presence. Finally, the artificial lighting system, hidden in long ‘slits’ in the ceiling, is a balanced play of diffuse and directed light and, at the close of day, draws the gaze from outside to in.