We didn’t want a guesthouse that looks rustic. We wanted a calm, comfortable house, with authentic old pieces and a few modern touches, placed so that they fit the village and its standing as a UNESCO site.
What we found in 2016
The farmstead at number 32 is unlike the others in the village: the house runs parallel to the road instead of end-on, and it had no outbuildings. There were three buildings. The Blue House, from 1912, had stood empty for twenty years. The big barn, today’s White Barn, was bare brick: old river stone in places, patched with modern materials in others. The small wooden barn, from 1869, collapsed in our first winter. We saved part of its frame, and the permits to rebuild it took more than two years.
How we worked
Alexu designed the project with the architect Cristi Kiss from Cluj-Napoca, who has long worked on historic buildings. We worked with Romanian, French and Hungarian carpenters, with workshops and small factories nearby, and in recent years with a building firm from Rupea, a quarter of an hour from Viscri.
The materials are the ones people here built with: painted and glazed clay stove tiles, handmade roof tiles and bricks, oak beams, earth plaster. We hunted for furniture in the villages and at antique fairs, and restored it. Some of the stoves we assembled ourselves.
What each building became
- The Blue House: two guest rooms, Johann’s Room and the Fräulein Room. The beams are the original ones, with Johann Dootz’s signature. The house’s armuroi, its painted Saxon wall chest, was missing, so we brought in another to take its place.
- The White Barn: the buffalo stable became the kitchen of the restaurant, the hayloft the dining room. Above it is a small flat, where we live.
- The New Barn: finished in 2020, with three rooms. The two in the attic, the Walnut Room and the Sunset Room, are old wood, handmade brick, painted tiles and earth plaster.
The stove tiles
The stoves in the house are built of painted tiles, many of them from Teracota Mediaș, the last factory in Romania that still presses and paints stove tiles by hand, as it has since 1906.
Alexu is a founding member of the Imbold Cultural Association, which made the exhibition “Teracota, mon amour!” with the factory, from its archive of more than a century. The exhibition travelled to the Astra Museum in Sibiu, Cantacuzino Castle and Romanian Design Week. On 31 August 2019 it opened in the East Bastion of Viscri’s fortified church and stayed there for a year, as part of the visitors’ route (Cotidianul, 30 August 2019, in Romanian).
Where the house has been written about
- Arhitectura, the magazine of the Romanian Order of Architects, 2018: “Casa albă din Viscri” (The white house in Viscri), text and photographs by Daniela Puia
- Zeppelin, 21 August 2024: “Recuperare prin meșteșug” (Recovery through craft)
- igloo, October 2024: the bilingual album “Pensiuni din Transilvania 2024” (Guesthouses of Transylvania), 14 guesthouses from across Transylvania, ours among them
- igloo, 13 August 2025: “Slow Food în Șura Albă” (Slow food in the White Barn)