Line Design Studio designed the interior of an apartment with an area of 47 square meters for a young man in an oriental ascetic style. The customer works in the IT field remotely, so an important wish was to create a comfortable workplace.
“The idea of making an apartment in an Asian style came to us while meeting a client. At the first meeting, we learned that the customer had a Japanese Shibu Inu dog. This is where the concept of ascetic minimalism with Asian motifs arose. Simple forms, natural materials, soft light, a lot of air, maximum functional objects,” say the founders of the design bureau, Mikhail Lenko and Alexander Vezlomtsev.
The apartment had an atypical layout. It had two bathrooms, a separate storage room, a kitchen, and a bedroom, but there was no living room. “After the redevelopment, we made the kitchen a walk-through: there were two new entrances – to the bedroom and to the living room. On the window side, we designed a small room with a sleeping place on the podium. The wall between the sleeping room and the newly formed living room was made translucent. We developed a special partition made of plywood, and the filling was made of frosted glass. And thus we let natural light from the bedroom into the living room,” say the authors of the project.
Both rooms, the living room, and the bedroom, can be isolated using a sliding door made of plywood. The door was designed specifically for this object. In addition to its functional purpose, the cellular structure of the door leaves is an important decorative element of the kitchen.
Black terrazzo is the main flooring material for the entire apartment. Terrazzo is real, it is made in production in the Kaliningrad region. The material itself has a unique texture, is pleasant to the touch, and compares favorably with terrazzo-like porcelain stoneware. The sleeping area is highlighted by a plywood podium. A mattress is placed on the podium as a direct reference to Asian life.
The color palette balances the visually cold floor. The designers chose a warm tone of base paint to cover the walls and existing concrete ceiling from the developer. This color maintains the shade of natural plywood.
Like all Line Design projects, the apartment is filled with custom pieces made specifically for the space. Here it is the kitchen, desk, dining table, sofa, and all the built-in cabinets. The work chair is from Muuto, the dining chairs are from Artu.
The apartment has two separate bathrooms. One was left as the main one, and the second was converted into a shower for dogs. The result is a small bathroom with its own storage system, which holds all hygiene products for pets, a shower stall with a high side, and a sink.
“We would like to note one solution that is invisible in the photograph but will be interesting to readers and designers. We left the ceiling concrete and needed to place ceiling rotating lights. Usually, in such cases, exposed wiring is fixed through special brackets into concrete, but the final result after painting always looks bad. We used the following method: we bought a flat wire for connecting to the lamps, which we glued to the ceiling with two-component glue – we got a smooth, beautiful line with wires.”
