Apartment as a gallery

The apartment is located in a newly emerging apartment building in Prague's Karlín, right in its pulsating center. However, its position facing a calm green courtyard is an advantage. The area of the apartment is approximately 100 m², which isn't large, but given that it has two levels, the apartment is very well usable.
The developer's standard ensures the entire apartment building is technologically very well equipped, which is good for user comfort on one hand, but relatively limiting in terms of design on the other.

BRIEF
Usually, people move from an apartment to a house. This time it was the opposite. A very nice married couple came to our studio with a request for a complete design of construction modifications and the interior of their new Karlín apartment, where they will move from a family house on the outskirts of Prague. They won't be bringing almost anything with them—just books and a few valuable pieces of modern paintings. We need to meaningfully fit these into the apartment along with the owners. The clients' first words were that they did not want too much industrial style, and the apartment should mainly be cozy. Enlightenedly, they left the larger room with a background to their son, emphasizing the need for storage spaces and display areas for their paintings.

IMPLEMENTATION
We always stick to the first idea and thought. This was the case this time as well. We wanted the apartment to be bright and as simple in expression as possible in order to find enough space for the exhibition of more than prominent paintings of relatively large dimensions. To optically enlarge the apartment, we divided the interior into three color bands. The gray ceiling consists of an exposed monolithic concrete ceiling, just below it is a horizontal band of gray plaster that creates the impression that the ceiling continues onto the vertical structures. However, their main surface is predominantly in white paint. The floor will be poured from epoxy screed. The owners' wish for a wooden floor was fulfilled in the lower level by at least covering the entire entrance area of the apartment and the kitchen with a ceiling made from flooring. In the upper level with the bedrooms, a wooden floor is designed.

We also applied our favorite principle here – the flooring is not only used for covering floors but also for making furniture and other apartment fittings. All the furniture is custom-designed. We intentionally kept it mainly in white color to achieve the greatest dematerialization of the apartment. We used perforated steel sheet as the main expressive element, from which a number of furniture components are made. The solution for the apartment also includes several surprising elements, such as storage spaces built into the steps of the staircase or a low podium that partially lines the living space and includes an unconventional seating area. However, the most striking element that shapes the living area is a large furniture module designed to evoke a concrete pillar. We placed it in the center so that we could develop individual zones of the living space around it, but also to bring at least a bit of Karlín's industrial feel into the interior.