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Architects: DeMachinas, Elina Loukou
- Area: 165 m²
- Year: 2023
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Photographs:Vassilis Makris
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Lead Architect: Elina Loukou
Text description provided by the architects. Three Object Apartment. The renovation of the first floor flat of this modernist building upgrades the interior space to an up-to-date apartment, whilst also being a study on unfinished architecture. On this project, together with the clients, we explored and experimented with an aesthetic fully tailored to the existing qualities of the site, as acquired. Located in a highly residential area, the building has been designed following modernist architectural principles.
It was originally split into three different properties, one per floor, with the common area of Pilotis on the ground floor. The building had been barely appealing to developers or private owners and was left abandoned for the past thirty years. The family who bought the first floor perceived it as a ‘dwelling canvas’, both on the first level and Piloti's level. Pilotis are usually used as a parking space in the city of Athens. In this case, it consists of a private covered area empty of programs, therefore available to be adapted by the users ad-hoc.
Inside the Three Object Apartment. The flexibility provided by the Pilotis inspired the dwelling on the first floor. The clients required a home with maximum flexibility and openness. Our design response to this program was to strip back the apartment to its bones, revealing the external shell, and the waffle ceiling and introducing three medium-scale functional objects. A round kitchen island forms an amalgamation of a worktop and a dining table, inviting social cooking and gatherings.
The neat storage block contains the kitchen pantry, cloak, wardrobes, and utilities. The cross, a corridor partition made of two large pivot panels and two pivot doors rotating around one center, brings flexibility to the adjacent rooms. It forms divisions between private and public areas and is a mechanism that unifies or separates the different compartments of the house, depending on the family’s needs.
During the construction stage, hidden layers were revealed and celebrated, in a process akin to archaeology. Concrete ceiling waffles have been carefully exposed and restored in all rooms. The existing marble floor was removed to be repurposed as terrazzo aggregate. The marble pattern within the terrazzo floor was not arbitrarily placed: together with the clients, we broke the salvaged terrazzo panels in situ, in selected locations, retaining the fragments as they fell - freezing the moment of stone breaking into pieces. The cementitious mortar found behind the existing tiled walls in the bathrooms was retained as the final wall finish. Neutral colors as well as all finishes on floors, walls, and ceilings, were chosen to soften the hard nature of the building fabric.
