Apartment on Chopin Street

The apartment is located on the second floor of a beautiful Art Nouveau building with a view of Riegrovy Sady. The original layout did not meet the needs of the investor and his family. The main task was to transform a poorly designed apartment into a much larger space that would cater to the needs of a large family. We discussed the investors' ideas about living and what they wanted the apartment and its individual spaces to offer — how they should look, what activities they wanted to do in them, and as the project developed over time, their ideas had a chance to mature. The key to the modifications was finding a new way to utilize the previously underutilized rooms. We achieved this in two ways — we changed the function (use) of individual rooms and incorporated various folded continuous panels throughout the apartment, creating a unified concept. The panels complement what each room was missing: in the children's room, it creates a sleeping and playing loft, access to it, a resting couch, and storage spaces, framing wardrobes. In the parents' bedroom, it creates a new, intensively used work loft, often praised by the investors, under which there is a large dressing area, in the hallway it serves as a library, shelves for the TV and associated electronics, concealing lighting and door tracks, in the kitchen it forms part of the kitchen unit, in the living room it serves as a shelf and serving table...

Layout
We created a kind of second living room with a TV and library in the previously large, empty, and unusable hallway. It was not easy to transform the hallway into a pleasant space for relaxation and watching TV, while still maintaining access to all rooms (children's room, living room, kitchen with dining corner, toilet, bathroom, pantry, and entrance), ensuring that the hallway did not become just a crossroads or "foyer." A dining table for everyday meals fit into the reasonably sized kitchen. The large living room, through the combination of watching TV in the hallway and the dining area in the kitchen, gained not only peace and space but also a large table that does not have to serve only for quick meals (which, for practical reasons, happen as close to the kitchen as possible). The parents' bedroom gained a fully functional office as an inserted loft (naturally part of the panels), which hides a large wardrobe underneath.

Although most of the furniture is designed with inserted brightly shaped panels or directly related to them, the investors pleased us by having the vast majority of the other furniture custom-designed — such as the bed, vanity table, children's shelves, cabinets, audio table, coffee table. With the overall reconstruction, we also addressed the "construction" interior — bathroom, toilet, utilities, and their concealment, and so on. Of course, we preserved all authentic elements such as floors, windows, doors including fittings, railings, wooden paneling, etc., which have been carefully restored and complemented, thus giving the apartment a flawless atmosphere and history.

Equally important to the interior as furniture is the new lighting, which can create many very different atmospheres, not only through intensity, direct lighting or reflection but also through color.

The interior and layout solutions are likely somewhat unorthodox and would not suit everyone, but more important than sticking to established dogmas is that the apartment perfectly meets the clients' needs, and they greatly enjoy living in it, which they never fail to mention at every opportunity.