35sqm micro-apartment
Residential, Renovation - Athens, Greece
2023 (ongoing)
Client: Private commission
Phase: Developed design documentation
This project concerns the complete renovation of a 35 sqm micro-apartment in Athens, conceived as a highly adaptable living environment with a dual programmatic use: a short-stay residence for the owners and their partners, and a flexible hospitality space for hosting friends and family.
Despite its limited footprint, the apartment is designed as a richly expressive interior - an intimate spatial composition that reflects the creative sensibilities of its owners, both active within the arts field. The design embraces colour, texture, and material variation as core instruments of spatial definition, resulting in a compact yet highly articulated domestic landscape.
The apartment is situated within a typical 1980s residential building. Rather than erasing its original character, the project selectively preserves and reinterprets key architectural elements: the decorative gypsum ceiling cornice, the solid marble fireplace clad in firebrick, and the existing natural wood parquet flooring. These features are treated as embedded traces of the building’s history, forming a stable backdrop for contemporary intervention.
The original layout, defined by irregular geometries and non-orthogonal walls resulting from the plot’s configuration, produced fragmented and inefficient spatial conditions. The design response was to simplify and clarify the plan, reorganizing the apartment into a more coherent and continuous spatial sequence.
At the core of the new layout lies an open kitchen, where a central island becomes the primary organising element of daily life. This space acts as both functional workspace and social anchor, structuring movement and interaction within the apartment.
To enhance spatial flexibility within the constrained footprint, the bedroom is no longer treated as a fixed enclosure. Instead, it is defined by a custom-designed timber partition composed of four operable panels. When closed, the system provides full privacy and separation; when opened, it dissolves entirely, merging the bedroom with the living area into a single continuous space.
The warm varnished timber finish of this intervention is carefully calibrated against the broader material palette, reinforcing a sense of cohesion, tactility, and intimacy throughout the apartment.
The project ultimately demonstrates how spatial generosity can be achieved through precision rather than scale - transforming a compact urban apartment into a highly adaptable, atmospheric, and character-driven interior.
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