Value Is Decided Before Construction: Observations from More Than Thirty Development Projects in Italy

Whether a complex asset can be brought back to life often depends on whether, before design begins, someone has thought through the genuinely difficult questions.

This is something we have grown more certain of after more than a decade of projects in Italy. What follows are some of those observations.

01 Value is often decided before construction begins

In Italian architectural practice, "development" has long been treated as the concern of developers and investors, and for that reason it is often overlooked by architects. An architect's work usually begins once the client already holds a site and a basic design concept, and ends with the delivery of construction drawings.

But if you look back at the projects that never came together, or that fell well short of expectations, you find that the problem rarely sits in the design phase. It sits earlier.

Can a former industrial building legally change its land-use class? Can a historic building gain commercial floor area within heritage constraints? Can a residential plot facing a waterway secure a volume bonus through energy upgrades? Can an operating brand obtain planning approval from a local authority?

If these questions are not handled seriously at the outset, no amount of good design can recover the situation later. What they determine is not whether a project looks good, but whether it can exist at all, and what it is ultimately worth.

02 Success and failure usually turn on a few specific stages

If you break down the full path of moving a complex asset from "idle" to "operating," the factors that truly decide the outcome tend to cluster in the following stages. Most occur before design, and most cannot be solved by design ability alone.

Feasibility and site selection.

Whether a site is worth committing to has to hold up across three dimensions at once: regulation, market, and operation. If any one of them fails, the effort that follows is wasted.

Planning and the regulatory path.

Land-use changes, volume bonuses, coordination with the heritage authority (Soprintendenza), infrastructure provision. Italy's planning instruments are complex, but many of them are underused. Whether they are used well is often the watershed for whether a project can move forward.

Stakeholder coordination.

Owners, operators, municipalities, heritage authorities, technical teams. Complex projects fail more often because these parties' priorities and timelines do not line up than because the design is poor.

The early value judgment.

Before committing to design, decide, with a product mindset, whether this asset should be sold, redeveloped, repositioned, or held and operated. If this judgment is wrong, everything invested afterward rests on a false premise.

The bridge between construction and operation.

The real test of delivery is whether a project can move smoothly into operation. If this stretch breaks, the earlier work is discounted at the very end.

Neglect any one of these five stages and a project can stall somewhere invisible. They are also hard to separate from one another, which is exactly why they are so easily underestimated.

03 A pattern that keeps recurring

Our understanding of this does not come from theory. It comes from repetition.

It began between 2011 and 2013, with our founder Francesco Di Nisio's work with the Italian fitness brand HappyFit.

From 2014 onward, he worked continuously with a leading European fitness operator, holding development and expansion roles within its Italian business. Over more than a decade, this collaboration spanned more than thirty facilities across Italy: from Friuli in the northeast, through Lombardy and the Veneto, to Rome, Naples, and as far as Sicily.

Looking at these thirty-some projects together, a pattern emerges. Regardless of the size of the facility or the tier of the city, the early development work appears in full in almost every project: feasibility, site selection, negotiation, permit strategy, dialogue with government, three-way coordination. The depth of design and construction, by contrast, was set against a benchmark held by the brand, and varied from project to project.

In other words, across one project after another, the constant was not design alone, but development. This is why we have come to believe that understanding development, and designing with a developer's mindset, sits closer to the real heart of a project.

This long collaboration also brought a less visible but very practical shift: we slowly learned to read a project in the operator's language. An opening date, the compliance of a parking space, the capacity of an electrical connection. To an operator, these are all commercial metrics. Understanding this often moves things forward more than understanding the regulations themselves.

04 Three concrete examples

Too much abstraction blurs the point. Here are three concrete situations.

Vicolo Venier, Treviso

The client originally intended to sell a long-idle plot outright. We advised taking the development through to the scheme-approval stage before selling. Using the window opened by the 2019 Piano Casa Veneto, and folding energy and sustainability measures into the overall strategy, the buildable volume was brought close to double. In the end the client sold the plot together with the approved scheme. The same piece of land, worth something entirely different because of a few extra steps.

Como Fitness Studio.

A former industrial site was reclassified, allowing the floor area of a disused factory to be legally converted into usable building area. Under the landscape controls of an adjacent nature park and heritage supervision, several dozen dedicated parking spaces were secured. In central Como, a parking provision of this kind is uncommon, and it bore directly on whether the property could be accepted by an operator.

Verona Fitness Studio

A protected nineteenth-century industrial building was brought from disuse into active operation through the coordinated approvals of the heritage, health, and fire authorities. The building's original iron roof trusses and industrial steel windows were kept in full, while taking on an entirely new function. Here, conservation and use were not in opposition.

What these three examples share is that the work that proved decisive all took place before the point at which "the architect is usually supposed to appear."

05 A closing note

These observations come from doing the same thing many times, and then noticing what kept recurring.

If you are facing an asset that is hard to move forward, or simply want to test a judgment, we would be glad to talk.